Efficient planning and monitoring at Mellanskog with easy to navigate dashboards

Mellanskog have developed a user-friendly system with navigable dashboards for all their users within the organization. Mercur Business Control is used for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, contract management and analysis. Mercur Business Control enabled Mellanskog to reduce manual and laborious work and streamline their processes.

Background 

Like many established organizations we were using outdated solutions for planning and monitoring, Björn Fredriksson, Controller at Mellanskog explains. Forestry is very modern in many ways but not when it comes to the finance function! Money for digitalization had been allocated to forestry but not accounting, finance and corporate performance management. We used old systems and Excel for analysis, budgeting, forecasting and profit & loss. We were told not to set up new account codes because of a fear of destroying the Excel sheet!

One solution for reporting/analysis and budgeting/forecasting

We agreed that we needed to do something about our laborious processes and in spring of 2018 it became the year we decided to replace our current solution with an ERP system hoping to solve our problems. We started visiting different organizations and realized that it wasn’t an ERP system we were looking for. Instead, we needed a system that integrates with our many different sources of information to better streamline our processes.

After a thorough procurement process in summer 2019, we selected Mercur. We called the project BiBop, short for Business Intelligence, Budgeting and Forecasting.

We were looking to improve our financial analysis centrally so as to understand the business better. It was important that the users in the organization could find answers when they saw any anomalies. We were also looking to improve our budget and forecast structure. Another goal was to have ‘one single version of the truth ‘to have a fully informed picture of the organization.

How we work in Mercur

We use Mercur Business Control for budgeting, forecasting, monthly reporting, contract management and analysis. The users of Mercur are managers and budget owners within the organization. Mercur is very user-friendly and it’s easy to navigate with role-based start pages. In other words, we now have one single version of the truth, and we can all access our data.

Our solution is based on three focus areas:

• Corporate performance management – covering production and contact with members 

• Market – as in customers and products 

• Overhead – as in profit-and-loss balance sheet

If needed you can drill and investigate to find more relevant data in our focus areas, on both product and customer level. It was important for us to keep our data on a geographical level with charts, figures, and maps.