Kepion Planning vs. Vena

The solution works extremely well for companies in complicated operations or with the ambition to forecast their operations on a driver based way or wanting to have the ability to create different scenarios based on external or internal drivers. It is a perfect piece of an existing analytical infrastructure (DWH/BI) lacking a planning solution on top.

It is well suited for scenarios where a company needs an efficient and scalable solution to implement in their daily products; it eases the work and saves time using Vena. However, I would not recommend this product before analyzing and estimating a budget because it can be pretty expensive for small and medium-sized companies.

Incentivized

• Budgeting and Forecasting: Kepion provides all budgeting, forecasting and actuals information in one, collaborative environment.
• Analysis: It is easy to traverse across your entire budgeting and forecasting spectrum in Kepion, unearthing insights that would be hidden from you in other tools.
• Workflow: Kepion's workflow management is simple and clear.

• Allows us to create just one template that will replicate based on which business segments we want to report on
• Allows end-users to dig into transaction details (our staff love this feature!)
• Very flexible in the way you can slice and dice data

Incentivized

• Silverlight functionality is outdated which makes the front end solution a little bit old compared to latest UI. They will be tackling it in Q2 2018, but it leaves users wanting for more.
• Reporting functionalities: Are not state of the art, we recommend users creating official reports within Kepion, but focusing on Tableau or PowerBI for reporting purposes as this is not and will never be Kepion strengths compared to the likes of Tableau.
• Being customizable is great, however, the solution is not an out-of-the-box solution and does require a little integration to work. For smaller companies (under 5M USD) I would still recommend Excel.

• It would be great if the templates didn't have to be launched from the download folder for end users. This concept is often confusing for end users and they don't always understand why they can't open the file back up from their downloads folder later on. Might be better if the templates opened in Excel online for end users when a workflow is in play.
• The data integration (API) is a bit confusing. All the steps and stages are hard to follow. It would be great if this area could be "dumbed" down a bit further for us non-data people.
• Permissions are a bit tedious to set up. We decided to set up permissions using permission user groups instead of task bindings because it would be easier to manage and not accidentally mess up but it still is really tedious because pretty much each person in our organization has to have a separate user group set up for them.
• The report books don't seem to work consistently and don't always follow our permission set up so they've not been useful. This is a feature I'd really like to take advantage of but it just isn't quite where I need it to be yet.
• The formula (DAX) building feature in Insights is not great. It would be more helpful if it showed you the same tooltips that PBI desktop shows you when you start typing out a formula.
• It would be very helpful to be able to drill down on a budget/forecast number and see the LID (line item detail) beneath it and not just the dimension details.

Incentivized

Vena has been a huge win for us as an organization, as it vastly improved our budgeting process by removing manual consolidation that was incredibly time consuming, and it allows us to see a multi-year view of our organizational budget across all of our funding sources. We've seen Vena's platform grow over the years and we've not yet fully adopted some of them so it feels like there's still potential to get even more value out of the platform.

Incentivized

This is split between usability from an end-user perspective and administrative. Administrative - The tool is lacking in a cohesive way to administer the tool, both from more of a back-end perspective (ETL/Integrations, scripting, etc.) as well as from a business administrative (Processes, Models, etc.). On the more back-end IT related aspects, the tool is a mishmash of modules that were clearly developed in stovepipe fashion. Basic feature/functionality aspects such as version control, auto vs manual save, etc. differ between the code preparation components. It is also lacking in any sort of coherent version control. Not all pages display the context information, so extreme caution must be used. There is also no coherent migration strategy. The process and model navigation has been somewhat challenging for our business administrators, often requiring assistance from Vena when creating or altering templates. 2 of 10 End User - This is better. The Excel add-in generally functions well. Creating basic templates is straightforward, and there is a large degree of flexibility when creating reporting templates. Being part of Excel puts many users into a comfort zone. The toggle switch between template and data mode is not well conceived, and the add-in pop-ups occasionally have issues on multi-monitor displays. 6 of 10

Incentivized

Contact with Vena Solutions technical support is quick and experts in the field always respond. It is not necessary to go through a large form to explain the problems and then answer more questions to receive a direct answer, we simply send a message indicating the specific problem and they are immediately there to actively help us

Incentivized

Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages

Incentivized

From initiate setup to going live, Vena's customer representatives and technicians have proven to be responsive and enthusiastic in getting our company up and running. They have been patient with our questions and frustrations and worked to troubleshoot issues that have come up.

Incentivized

The original training was onsite and over two weeks. Since our original onboarding the company has come out with a training website to aid in user self directed needs.

Incentivized

The online training was effective, it would be nice to see a more personalized solution. I understand the training is tailored for all industries, but it would be nice to see industry-specific use cases.

The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates

Kepion is in a unique position in that it has all of the enterprise-grade functionality and scalability of a tool like Cognos, but it is available at a lower price point, with much more engaged support.

Vena has better reporting and budgeting functions than NetSuite Budgeting & Reporting when we compared the two. The Kansas City Chiefs currently use Vena and they had nothing but good things to say about it so that gave us confidence to go with Vena.

Incentivized

We use Vena across 10 countries and 200 users who are located in a wide range of settings and internet reliability. Even with that wide implementation, the most common issue we run into is a new hire not installing the Vena add-in, which is a super quick fix. Depending on our user's location, the internet can sometimes be spotty, but that is outside of Vena's control and even in those settings, Vena might take a little longer to open a template, but it still does open and the user can complete their work. Over 5 years of using Vena, we've collectively only had 3 issues where we needed Vena support to help look at a specific issue a user was having.

Incentivized

• Saved considerable time for monthly close by streamlining reporting and entries
• Saved considerable time and effort for reconciliations by standardizing input and output and ability to send reviews to different users and track completion
• Saved a lot of headache when tracking down variances

Incentivized