Arkea's Process Modernization - Better Visibility to Business Figures and Flow to Finance Operations

About Arkea

Industry
A conglomerate providing food, cleaning, facility, real estate, and household system services.

Service solution
Outsourced Accounting Services, Staria BI & Planning

Web page
https://www.arkea.fi/fi

Arkea is a conglomerate that provides food, cleaning, facility, real estate, and household system services. The company’s roots are in the 50s organizing school meals for the City of Turku. Nowadays Arkea is operating at a national level and provides services to both municipal authorities and the private sector. Their focus is on providing food and cleaning services to day-care and healthcare services and schools. In the private sector, Arkea concentrates on staff restaurants and office cleaning, as well as catering and real property maintenance services.

Corporate responsibility is important to Arkea and it shows in its daily operations. The company considers the environmental impact of its operations and processes. It strives to pay attention to all the parties and communities that their business affects.

Ambitious goals

Although Arkea’s roots are in the City of Turku, its operative environment is on the free market. Therefore, the company must be able to react swiftly to changing situations, but the reporting process was rigid and slow. Main goals of the project were strongly linked to increasing competitiveness and, thus, growth and profitability.

“At Arkea, we began thinking about the possibility of updating the entire financial administration system, because the previous system did not support our needs in rapidly changing business environment. Reporting required a great deal of manual work and the old system could not be developed to suit Arkea's needs. The goal was also to improve and streamline financial operations, which would lower administration service costs”, says Pirjo Kankaanranta, the CFO of Arkea.

A partner to match future needs

The scope of the project required changes in Arkea’s processes as well. Arkea wanted to find a partner that could implement a wide-scale reform project so that systems and new processes would seamlessly work together while managing the project as a whole. The long-term goal was to find a partner that actively develops their own processes and services and therefore continuously improving Arkea's processes in the long run.

The required process changes had large impact on business, which is why choosing a suitable partner was important. The service requirement included accounting and reporting, accounts payable and receivable, payment transactions and day-to-day financial management services. Before competitive tendering, Arkea mapped out their current processes so that they could sufficiently describe what their requirements for the systems and partner was.

“For Arkea, the key criteria for choosing the new solution were system architecture and how it could be integrated to existing operative systems the user-friendliness of these systems in Arkea's day-to-day operations as well as service and systems costs. What was also valued was the partner’s ability to develop processes in a comprehensive manner and to utilize various smart solutions in financial administration”, Kankaanranta describes.

The partnership between Arkea and Staria has begun successfully.

“From the beginning our cooperation with Staria has been fluent and straightforward. The project progressed as planned and Staria has actively searched for solutions for Arkea’s needs. While service production has only been ongoing for a few weeks, people at Arkea have already noticed the improved efficiency of various previously manual work phases. I’m eager to see how fluently our processes will work after our partnership has been going on for a few months”, Kankaanranta says.

Improved efficiency and control through systems

Netvisor, the cloud-based financial platform, was chosen because of its drill-in ability to transactional level and because its modern interfaces. The ability to seamlessly integrate the customer’s current systems with the new financial platform was critical for the service solution and its efficiency. For example, Point-of-Sales and ERP systems were integrated to Netvisor.

“After my short user experience, I can say that Netvisor seems to be a modern and user-friendly system. The new system has significantly improved for example the efficiency of purchase invoice processing”, Kankaanranta says delightfully.

Another important system update was needed in the forecasting and reporting processes. For these, Arkea chose the cloud-based Staria BI & Planning solution. It includes budgeting, forecasting, and reporting features in a single platform. The plan is to integrate Arkea’s other systems and progressively build a full-scale business intelligence environment that supports Arkea's business management.

“Staria BI & Planning is a handy reporting and budgeting tool that has so far fulfilled all our reporting needs and wishes. Clear reports, graphs, and possibilities to provide comprehensive data help our managers to better understand the situation of their areas of responsibility. Data that supports decision-making is available in real time without unnecessary manual work. Contrary to the past, a cloud-based solution ensures that data is easily available“, Kankaanranta concludes.