Vena - Best Bang for your buck. You get a Ferrari for the price of a Honda!
February 12, 2016
Vena - Best Bang for your buck. You get a Ferrari for the price of a Honda!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vena Solutions
We are currently using Vena to Budget, Forecast, and Report. Vena is being used across our organization Domestically, with plans to roll it out to our international team during Q1 of 2016.
Vena has been helped us create a single source of truth and achieve rapid adoption due to the nature of it being a technology stack that sits on top of Excel, a platform that everyone in our organization is familiar with and comfortable using.
The ability to both send and retrieve information through report and input templates has really help streamline and automate many of our core FP&A processes.
Vena has been helped us create a single source of truth and achieve rapid adoption due to the nature of it being a technology stack that sits on top of Excel, a platform that everyone in our organization is familiar with and comfortable using.
The ability to both send and retrieve information through report and input templates has really help streamline and automate many of our core FP&A processes.
- The ability to to audit changes is a huge help when analyzing multiple iterations of budget submissions. They have built in a really robust audit tool compared to many of the other vendors out there.
- The workflow and security is absolutely critical. Having the ability to create one template to leverage across 35 different profit centers based on role based security/access is amazing. The last thing you want to do is maintain 35 different templates to ensure people only get access to the data that is applicable to them. Vena solved this with role based security.
- Instant Aggregation. It is very useful to be able to run reports with instant aggregation to see how things are shaping up during a budget or forecast cycle.
- I believe it has all the necessities, but of course there are always going to be items on the wishlist. One of the items I recently submitted as a enhancement request is the ability to perform dynamic expansion with nested rows and nested columns.
- I would also like to see the ability to created automated report blocks.
- The cascade feature is great for blowing out a report that leverages the same format for has multiple views (i.e. different Business Units or Profit Centers). However, I wish you could cascade on multiple tabs at once instead of one at a time.
- Timeliness. We have recognized a huge savings in the amount of time it takes to close our books and deliver monthly financial reports. Some reports are a whole week sooner, while others are being delivered 2-3 weeks faster prior to Vena.
- Vena has helped us remove the bottle neck from accessing data from our ERP system.
- Increased productivity from our operations folks during the budget process.
- BPC
Vena is a fraction of the cost of SAP's flagship product BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation). There are actually a lot of similiarities between the two platforms, but I believe that Vena has really delivered a superior product overall. There are a few features that I had using BPC, that I wish Vena could do, but it's just a matter of time before they will be available in Vena.