Naviloq is in the Heart of PHM Group’s Complex Reporting Environment

About PHM Group

Founded
1992

Business
Property Services

Service solutions
Naviloq BI & Planning solution

Webpage
https://www.phmgroup.com/

PHM Group is a growing property services group with a mission to care about people by taking care of their surroundings. PHM Group consists of local companies, who share the same values and responsible way of working, and they believe that the only thing better than local service is local service with big resources. Their service offering is broad, focusing on property maintenance, management and cleaning services while providing some add-on services as well. The aim is to be a full-service partner for residential and other local properties.

PHM Group was founded in 1992 but the company’s growth really took off in 2018, when a private equity company Intera Partners became the majority owner of the group. Two years later when a Norwegian private equity company Norvestor acquired the majority of PHM Group, the company’s revenue had more than tripled.

Today PHM Group has reached revenue over EUR 700 million and the group has completed over a hundred acquisitions since Norvestor acquired them in 2020. They operate in 5 countries being the market leader in Nordics and employ over 8000 people. The group consists of more than 150 local companies and their vision is to grow into a leading local property services partner in all of their operating countries, which are Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany.

Complex reporting environment requires a lot from systems

The fact that PHM Group consist of over 150 local companies and the company is doing new acquisitions in a rapid pace puts pressure on the reporting framework. Due to the complexity that 150 individually operating units and c.a. 200 legal entities bring, it’s very important to get harmonised and structured data flow. In the heart of PHM Group’s reporting environment is BI & Planning tool Naviloq and its built-in data warehouse.

Each PHM Group’s operating country uses a financial system from where company financials are brought to the data warehouse through integration. For new acquired companies whose financials are not centralised, PHM Group has a standardised process of CSV uploads that they have built together with Staria. From the data warehouse company financials are transferred to consolidation system where some adjustments are made, after that the data is brought back to the data warehouse where the master data is available for PHM Group’s units to be viewed and analysed. In addition to company financials, PHM Group utilises data from CRM and HR systems. From these three elements PHM Group builds dashboards to their units that can comment on results and answer questions straight in Naviloq.

To work in this extended model where business units are engaged to reporting and analysis process (Extended Planning & Analysis) and financial and operational data is combined, a company needs to have an integrated, flexible and unified platform.

It is important for us to get reliable and comparable data efficiently from the acquired companies immediately after the acquisition, so that control over the acquired companies is maintained.

With Staria, we have created a flexible model where we are able to combine data from many different sources and from companies that are in different integration phases and harmonise it into an analysable form. Due to rapid changes, flexible cooperation is also crucial to us, which has worked great with Staria.

Collaborative reporting and planning process supported by Naviloq

PHM Group is doing normal monthly closings and forecasts twice a year. Unit managers are a part of these processes and engaged in them with the help of Naviloq.

During a normal monthly closing, when financials are ready in the accounting system, the data is transferred to the data warehouse and Naviloq. First controllers go through the numbers and release them to unit managers who receive an email notification that the numbers are ready to be viewed. At this point, regional directors have already had an opportunity to post clarifying questions. When unit managers log into Naviloq, they have a standard process they need to go through: commenting budget/forecast, answer possible questions and send it back to controllers who will then check the answers. This commenting round can go back and forth until controllers are satisfied with unit managers’ answers. When result commenting is ready in Naviloq, controllers gather them up and deliver them to the management team and the board.

Twice a year PHM Group also makes forecast reports. Similarly to monthly closings, the process is also standardised and based on the cooperation of unit managers, region directors and controllers. Controllers and unit managers have dialogue straight through Naviloq where controllers can also assign tasks to unit managers to prepare forecasts.

Transition to current way of working

Contrary to what one might think, PHM Group’s transition to the new way of working wasn’t hard. For the employees it was a relief to have a standardised way of working and as many unit managers are former entrepreneurs and still are partners in the Group, they have a genuine interested towards the figures, results and data – they really want to have the insights. Before Naviloq, the unit managers were looking at their numbers from their respective financial systems, which caused many problems: e.g. no view on budgets, all numbers were in different currencies, different accounting policies were used and no adjustments or eliminations were made in the numbers unit managers saw through their financial systems. So, the communication throughout the group was hard when people were looking at different set of numbers.

It has made life a lot easier when we have been able to look at the same data source when talking to the units. It has enabled us to concentrate on the issue at hand rather than spending time on figuring out what numbers to talk about and why they differ. Feedback from the units has been really good and our controllers are saving a lot of time.

Correct tools also impact career growth and employee satisfaction

Nowadays as PHM Group is utilising Naviloq, their finance professionals are able to focus on analysing results and discussing contents rather than just generating reports. This has also enabled PHM Group to scale up the business without having to increase resourcing in financial management. With the huge amount of local companies and entities, PHM Group would require an army of finance professionals if they had to use as much time and energy to generate reports as before. Luckily Naviloq has helped to cut that down, which was a major change for the group.

Our finance professionals have evolved from report generators to business partners and controllers get to be what, to my understanding, a true controller really is; someone who controls how the business is doing rather than just producing the numbers.