Automating the Office of Finance at Laerdal

Laerdal Medical is dedicated to helping save lives by developing products, programs, and services to improve resuscitation, emergency care, patient safety, and global health. The company serves the needs of healthcare providers and educators with products and services for Basic and Advanced Life Support, Simulation, Airway Management, Immobilization, Patient Care, Self-directed Learning, and Medical Education.

Laerdal has dedicated the last 60 years to vital medical research and has big ambitions to make a huge impact on society, with the goal of saving 500,000 more lives every year.

The Laerdal group is focused on three business areas: patient care, resuscitation, and a non-profit organization called Laerdal Global Health which takes care of people living in low resource income countries.

Board Project Overview

• Board Financial Consolidation 4.0

  • ​19 currencies

  • 16 nodes

  • 96 reporting units

  • 285 cost centers

  • 229 product groups

• Managerial reporting

• Project budgeting & reporting

• Sales, Marketing & Services forecasting

The journey from financial consolidation to operational budgeting and forecasting

Laerdal’s existing financial reporting system was too cumbersome and rigid to keep pace with the growth of the organization. Identifying this problem, the management team decided the legacy software should be replaced with a modern IT platform that would support the business in achieving its ambitious goals.

Laerdal was looking for a transformative solution capable of unifying different processes in a single environment – from analytics to planning, reporting, and forecasting. This had to be achieved across 33 legal entities, 96 business units, 16 branches with no ERP system (only CSV-based solutions), and a plethora of data sources including Oracle Sibel, Salesforce, Cornerstone, and Dell Boomi applications.

Robin Wittmeyer, Project Manager at Laerdal, explains the selection process:

There was lots of extra stuff we needed to do so we did one vendor round focused around two key criteria. The solution had to be a best-in-class product and it had to be a cloud platform, which is why we selected Board.

The unification of processes at Laerdal was broken down into four key project areas:

• Financial consolidation, covering the entire financial-close cycle, to deliver the final financial statements to board members and relevant authorities;
• Managerial reporting to keep control of KPIs and deliver financial reports to stakeholders, managers, and decision-makers
• Financial planning and analysis to provide project managers with financial budgets and details of their performance
• Sales, Marketing and Service forecasting to allow process stakeholders to generate and share their forecasts and provide useful information for Laerdal’s supply chain

Transforming financial and non-financial processes according to the real needs of the decision-makers

Robin continues by explaining how, with Board, Laerdal has been able to integrate processes and data across the organization to create a single point of truth: 

Now we're in much better shape. We have the financial figures to support our business. We have the KPIs presented to management. The project managers can use the system to drill down and see where costs are coming from. They can go so far that they can actually pick up the invoice itself and bring it up. So, it's a huge improvement. But we would have never changed our master data unless we had seen the transparency that Board gave us to start with.

As Lars Christiansen, Finance Systems Implementation Manager at Laerdal, highlights, all financial data coming from the different databases is reconciled in the Board Financial Consolidation environment:

What’s important to see here is that we have the reconciliation database. And that means that all the data is reconciled here, so that we are absolutely sure that the consolidated financial statement reporting, statutory reporting, and managerial reporting are aligned. We have a decentralized loading process, meaning that all the users load data themselves and they follow our process and validate data themselves. Therefore, at the end, when we validate every month, we validate 33 legal entities in Board.

The financial consolidation process is fully automated with Board Financial Consolidation, as Lars continues:

We automatically consolidate 96 reporting units, 16 nodes, 19 currencies, 285 cost centers, and 229 product groups. In the managerial reporting, this workflow is automatically executed every night.

In Laerdal, as in any other company, the financial dimension is not separated from the operational one. Thanks to Board Intelligent Planning Platform's capabilities, Laerdal can generate internal reports to better understand the performance and financial impact of manufacturing, supply chain, and the external sales activities, as Lars continues:

Every day when we come to work, we enter Board and we have the latest data from yesterday, already within this workflow.

In budgeting and reporting processes, users follow the different steps that they need to execute and end up with a budget summary. Similarly, with the sales, marketing, and services forecast figures, people follow a process-driven approach which ends up in a forecast summary. Lars concludes:

We have simultaneous data entry from 33 countries, scenario simulation, multicurrency data entry, auditability, and a validation workflow. Board makes it possible to create a unique data layer where information is translated in each business unit according to the real needs of the decision-makers.