"As the company grew in size and complexity, we had it very clear that we needed to implement a robust but flexible planning solution. Vena enabled us to better structure our workflows and reduce complexity in our planning process while increasing our productivity. Having Excel as a front-end simplified user onboarding and assured broad acceptance in the organization"
Ivan Vranković - FP&A Manager, Volotea
The Challenge: A Need for a Faster, More Scalable FP&A Solution
If your company is growing, you need tools that help facilitate that growth, while evolving along with your team. That’s precisely the issue Volotea, an airline headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, was experiencing with its old FP&A processes, including planning, analysis, budgeting and forecasting. Ivan Vranković, FP&A Manager at Volotea, needed to upgrade the company’s financial planning process, which his team was relying completely on Excel to facilitate.
“It was prone to errors or sometimes had broken formulas—typical Excel problems,” he says. “As the company was growing, we became aware that we needed to structure the process better, define workflows within the company and be able to audit changes.”
Like other airlines and travel-centric companies, the pandemic heightened Volotea’s need to quickly respond to volatility. Flexible planning and adaptability were essential for every department, especially the finance team.
“All of this meant we needed a full-stack solution for financial planning,” Ivan says. After speaking with element61—an analytics, performance management and data science consulting firm that had helped another airline in a similar situation—Ivan went with Vena.
Volotea’s Workflows Achieve Lift With Vena
Ivan says his team loved Vena’s well-developed workflow processes, and that Volotea’s finance team was able to effectively own the platform—there was no need for IT intervention. The team worked with element61 on an initial implementation, then took over after a few months. It was clear, in short order, that Vena ticked all the Volotea team’s boxes.
“We wanted a solution that was faster and not purely dependent on Excel, something that was structured, and that had a database behind it,” says Ivan. “On the other hand, we also like the flexibility of Excel.”
Ivan says Vena’s Excel-native interface, combined with its powerful centralized database, provided the full-stack solution he was looking for. This also greatly eased change management for the rest of the organization as the Excel look and feel gave a sense of familiarity to users, which in turn sped up the training process.
Benefits
Vena’s been so effective at tuning up Volotea’s FP&A processes that the company has been able to speed up its FP&A activity by around 50% and save roughly two days per week on planning processes. This has allowed the Volotea team to focus more of their attention and resources on tracking their cost performance.
"I know in every moment where a task is, the person responsible for the task and that there’s a sense of control with what’s happening with the data. I take it all for granted."
Ivan Vranković - FP&A Manager, Volotea
