Value driver Big Data

Agile performance management - what does that mean and what challenges did your company have to overcome to reach market maturity?

Khai Tran: In times of advancing digitalization, companies are exposed to growing pressure to continuously question and adapt their business model. At the same time, the demands on corporate management (performance management) are increasing:

Planning and forecasting need to become more efficient and agile to support management decision-making as conditions change. Valsight enables companies and groups to improve control processes such as planning and forecasting with a combination of new technologies and specialist best practices.

As a result, the level of detail and effort involved in financial planning is significantly reduced and the quality of planning is increased. The path to the first enterprise customers was certainly challenging. There are easier use cases for start-ups than corporate management.

Thus, in the first one to two years, we often found ourselves caught between the maturity level of our software demanded by prospective customers and the desire for new, innovative solutions for improving business processes.

In the meantime, we have overcome the many hurdles and consider ourselves very fortunate to be able to count a large number of exciting and innovative corporations among our customers.

What support have you received from SAP in this regard?

Tran: Valsight is a spin-off from the Hasso Plattner Institute and an investment from Hasso Plattner Ventures. As a result, the founding team already looked back on many years of good cooperation with SAP.

Just a few weeks after the company was founded, we were accepted into the SAP Startup Focus program - an important milestone, as the associated technical validation by the Startup Focus team meant special confirmation of our product vision.

Since then, we have consistently worked with the Startup Focus program on marketing and sales - for example, the team has enabled us to participate in a variety of SAP customer events in Europe and the US.

Establishing internal contacts with SAP sales was also very helpful in order to make joint presentations to corporate customers with a strong partner.

Why do you rely on SAP Hana in-memory technology for your offering?

Tran: Hana allows almost any amount of data to be flexibly filtered and aggregated. The solution thus forms an optimal opportunity to be used as a flexible data source for our software and to take over computationally intensive steps in data preparation.

As a cloud-based solution provider, the Hana Cloud Platform is also strategically relevant. But here, too, we have not yet reached the end of the line - our vision includes not only simulation but also stochastic approaches and predictive analytics, which is why we are increasingly looking at developments around the Hana PAL.

Where do you see the greatest unique selling point of your offering?

Tran: The special feature of our software is the combination of modern technologies such as simulation and in-memory with current professional best practices in performance management.

Unlike other providers, we focus on the strategic planning process right through to the target setting for operational planning. To be even more specific here:

In corporate planning, groups rely on value driver models and scenarios to reduce the effort and level of detail in planning and to increase quality and transparency. In addition, there is a strong focus on strategic measures in order to better link strategic planning with operational planning.

Our solution consistently supports these approaches by providing the business department with an easy-to-use interface to simulate the impact of changed value drivers and strategic measures on key KPIs quickly and easily.

Where does the data that you prepare come from?

Tran: In simulation-based planning (strategic/medium-term planning, target setting), plan scenarios are simulated on the basis of existing basic data. For this purpose, our customers usually use current actual or forecast data.

In terms of a "single version of truth", these are usually stored in a central DWH (e.g. SAP BW) and are transferred via the interfaces available in Valsight. Here we rely on JDBC and OData. Data that is not available centrally can simply be loaded as a .csv file.

What requirements do Valsight customers have to meet in terms of master data and IT infrastructure?

Tran: Almost all of our larger customers use SAP solutions such as BW or, in particular, Hana, which, with a "clean" database, form a very good prerequisite for meaningful simulations in Valsight. However, thanks to flexible interfaces, other systems can also be used as data sources.

Since Valsight is primarily used as a cloud solution (on-premise is possible) and is used via the web browser, there are no special requirements for the system infrastructure.

What implementation times should potential customers expect and what support do you offer in the pre-project phase?

Tran: Our cloud solution can be used immediately in controlling - so there is no technical rollout process. Since we focused strongly on user-friendliness from the very beginning, company-specific key figure models from the P&L to more complex value-added driver trees can be created by the specialist department in a very short time.

Of course, this depends on the respective company and the use case - on average, however, we are talking here about a few weeks at most, and by no means about projects lasting months. If desired, we accompany customers through this process and offer individual consulting and training services as well as support.

What are the next steps and how does SAP Startup Focus support you?

Tran: In the first few years, we focused primarily on our product in order to develop software that would bring about real process improvements in business planning.

Now that some well-known corporations have introduced Valsight, we want to substantially increase our customer base. We will now invest more in marketing & sales - both by increasing our presence at industry and trade events and by expanding our sales team.

This is where we see real added value from the Startup Focus program. We look forward to taking our partnership to the next level together.