inlumi blog

At inlumi Inspiration Day 2021, team members voted to support the building of a vulture restaurant to enable the return of endangered vultures in Namibia. This rewilding project by our sustainability partner, Mossy Earth, provides a safe and reliable source of food for these magnificent and ecologically important species.

When I started my first internship in a Finance department in 2005, we actively used Excel for most of our Finance processes. I am amazed that after all these years, Excel is still prevalent as a data source for reporting. Although Excel certainly has its place, a performance management solution is imperative for carrying out complex financial processes, enabling Finance to become a true business partner.

Nathan is a Managing Consultant at inlumi and has been part of the team in the Netherlands since 2016. We interviewed Nathan to learn what drove him to become a consultant and what he enjoys most about his role. Understanding people is a key part of Nathan's work as a consultant, with the aim of enabling organisations – and the people that work there – to perform at their best.

Finance and the rest of the business are collaborating more and more, and advances in technology mean that we now have solutions that can support organisation-wide planning. Are you ready for xP&A?

Last year, Rob Wang joined inlumi as an Analyst in our London office. We interviewed Rob to hear about why he joined inlumi, how inlumi has supported his development, and how it has been to get to know the team during challenging times.

You may or may not be familiar with the “catch 22” idiom. It is where one is trapped between two contradictory conditions, a somewhat inescapable paradox. It is a situation that I frequently come across when discussing the benefit of an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution. Organisations are in desperate need of a tool that streamlines their FP&A processes, but the team involved shudders at the thought of implementing a solution.

Joachim Brandt is a Principal Consultant at inlumi Norway. In 2020, Joachim led the implementation of a consolidation solution in Oracle EPM Cloud at Fiven, a chemicals company headquartered in Oslo. Having previously done all their consolidation in Excel, Fiven now has a scalable solution which has significantly improved their close processes, reporting, and analysis.

As a Commercial Manager in our Managed Services division, I have been very busy recently trying to fit as many upgrades for organisations as I can into our schedule to meet the December deadline for Hyperion 11.1.2.4, expiring on Oracle Premier Support. Rightly or wrongly, there had been quite a lot of indecision about whether to make the move or stay with a release that is moving to Oracle Sustaining Support and the implications this has. Owing mostly to security concerns with the lack of vulnerability patches post Dec 2021, many organisations have now decided that upgrading sooner is better, but that timeline is now likely to push into early 2022.

It is a reality that employee-related costs comprise a significant percentage of an organisation’s operational costs. Typically, a Workforce planning solution caters to the traditional finance cycle of the annual budget and the year-to-go periods of the quarterly forecasting. If an organisation wanted to perform long-term planning of Workforce costs, this was done at a cost centre level with a subset of accounts. The COVID pandemic triggered an emphasis on the costs, with organisations quickly looking for ways to gain further insight into them. A critical aspect in the decision-making is truly understanding where these costs are.

When I ask organisations how frequently they perform a forecast, the response is almost universally the same: every quarter with an annual budget. Mid- to long-term planning was often done manually in Excel even if an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) solution was in place. The focus was on the short term with special attention to the budget.