“When it comes to persistence you have as many at-bats as you’re willing to give yourself.”
These wise words from best-selling author Alex Banyan perfectly set up the theme for day three of Vena Nation: the importance of being persistent and adopting a growth mindset, both in life and in business.
Throughout his keynote, Alex shared stories about how he overcame fear to chase down and interview some of the world’s most successful business leaders and luminaries— including Warren Buffett, Larry King, Quincy Jones and Jessica Alba—for his book The Third Door. It was a can’t miss session and if you weren’t able to catch it live, you can watch it on demand (along with all of the other sessions) over at plantogrow.com.
Here were a few more of the top takeaways from Day 3 at Vena Nation:
To grow into a world class organization, you need a world class planning platform
During his keynote, Road to Growth, on the third day of Vena Nation, Andrew Stanbridge (VP, Product at Vena Solutions) stressed the importance of businesses adopting a world class business planning platform to enable them to drive sustainable growth. For many organizations, planning platforms can be a hurdle to growth because they lack features, are difficult to use and don’t integrate with external data sources. But a world class planning platform can not only alleviate those pain points, but actually act as a springboard for transformational growth.
In his presentation, Andrew outlined the three pillars of a world class planning platform:
- Insights – The ability to analyze all of the information at your disposal using data visualization tools so you can extract valuable insights. Top insight needs include: deep analysis and visualization, scenario modeling, report distribution and ad hoc reporting.
- Planning – The ability to plan for today and tomorrow in an agile, integrated, and collaborate manner. An important prerequisite for agile business planning is being able to quickly connect all of your business data from internal and external sources so that you have a complete view of your business.
- Adoption – The ability for everyone at your company, even non-technical people (who are sometimes the decision makers) to be able to use the planning platform. Frictionless, easy to use tools are more important than ever because integrated planning requires participation from stakeholders across the business. A powerful and feature-rich planning platform is effectively useless if it is not user-friendly.
Business intelligence tools are key to driving organizational growth and strategic decision making
In their training session, “Strategic Decision Making with Power BI,” Lead Product Manager at Vena, Anna Robinson, and Solutions Architect Zintis Vandelis took a deep dive into how business intelligence platforms are quickly becoming one of the valuable tools for finance teams to help accelerate strategic, cross-functional decision making. Business intelligence tools enable companies to deliver insights at the speed of business and add finance expertise to business decisions.
In their presentation, Anna and Zintis showcased how the Vena connector for Power BI allows organizations to:
- Connect and explore their data in minutes
- Access all of their data in one place in real time
- Collaborate and share your dashboards with their team
- View insights in any browser or mobile device
The power of connected systems
Senior Product Manager Kari Ostevik and Product Manager Stefan Mak delivered an insightful session on “The Power of Connected Systems.” As mentioned above, one of the prerequisites for agile finance-led business planning is being able to easily and automatically connect your business data from external sources and systems so that you have a single source of the truth. Manually uploading data from external systems is simply too consuming and error-prone for most businesses, which is why having the ability to automatically pull and integrate data from external sources such as your ERP, CRM, and HRIS is so powerful.
Kari and Stefan demonstrated just how easy it is to pull in data from all of your internal and external systems with the Vena platform. Vena is source-system agnostic, meaning that it can bring in data from any system, and has three types of powerful automatic connectors:
Vena Connector – The Vena Connector is source agnostic, meaning it can bring in data from any system, and can import CSV, TDF, and PSV flat files. The connector also has the ability to export the data back to your servers.
Power Automate – Microsoft’s Power Automate allows you to easily connect to box, OneDrive, STFP, and more. All users need to do is drop a file into any of th systems that Power Automate sports and that file will automatically be brought into Vena.
Native Connectors – Vena also features a number of native connectors that allow users to easily pull in data from Salesforce, Sage Intaact, Netsuite, and QuickBooks. The beauty of these native connectors is that they form a direct connection with the source system (no flat files needed) and require little set-up.
Not only do these connectors save finance teams a lot of time and reduce human error, but they allow key stakeholders to view all of the data they need to make business decisions in one place.
To view all Vena Nation sessions live and on demand, head over to plantogrow.com and register now for your free All Access pass.