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Meg Bear had spent most of her career in insurance and automotive. She’s been an auditor, a director of finance and operations and a VP of finance.
In Spring 2021, Meg joined Turner Enterprises, wanting to “do something different, something that really made a difference.” Turner’s environmental and biodiversity work, as well as their mix of “small-company feel” and challenging technical projects were a strong fit for Meg. As their new Controller, she wanted to modernize Turner by leading her own technical project.
“For a multi-location company, we were very locked into a paper process,” she said. “In creating the job that I want for the future, I wanted to bring in some automation, as well as make our data more transparent, our reporting more usable and our budgeting process much more friendly.”
Meg wanted to connect Turner’s “dissociated Excel models.” After narrowing her vendor shortlist to Vena and Prophix, she knew Turner’s executives, mid-level leaders, location managers and other budget owners would feel most comfortable within Vena’s Excel native interface, especially when faced with the need to make faster decisions amid heightened economic uncertainty.
“Our user base is fairly non-technical. Having Excel as the backbone really made sense instead of trying to deploy a whole new interface and a whole new website—things that were going to be harder for our users. As things change, we need to be able to change it. I didn't want to be locked down.”
It wouldn’t be easy for Meg to inspire change within Turner. According to LinkedIn, their median employee tenure is just under 11 years.
She had first envisioned AP automation as phase one, but pivoted to starting with budgeting, forecasting and reporting.
“An output process like reporting and budgeting and forecasting is a much easier thing for people to grab onto for technology and business process change than an input process like AP,” she explained.
Since implementing Vena’s automated templates for budgeting, forecasting and reporting, the Turner team spends less time manually inputting actuals.
But serving as the only data modeler, administrator and manager within Vena on her small team, Meg didn’t have the bandwidth to elevate Turner’s templates further. She pursued Vena’s Expert Managed Services Plus (EMS+), a tailored and unique experience that provided Turner with two dedicated Vena Experts, Christine Song and Pip Narborough, to serve as extensions to her small internal team.
“I really needed someone to help me learn so I didn't spin my wheels trying to figure out how to map something and just know the intricacies of our data and our situation. Christine and Pip have been really helpful.”
Christine and Meg collaborated, using staging queries (which configures and connects disconnected data tables) to create custom CapEx templates with new data dimensions. Now even after budgets are finalized, Turner’s team can quickly locate the details of any asset or transaction by individual project. These fixed asset budgets are also now connected to Turner’s financial reports.
“It allowed Meg to plan current and future assets at a more granular level,” said Christine. “Their team has a wide project portfolio, so the greater visibility let their users better manage project assets and analyze those project transactions. It improves cost efficiency.”
Pip and Meg worked together to automate Turner’s check register data. Now, Meg no longer has to load it daily, but instead, this more detailed data is now connected to Turner’s monthly review reports. And using Vena’s Report Books feature, they automated Turner’s monthly report distribution to provide Turner’s users with easy access. Pip is currently making data calculation and format adjustments to their custom workforce templates to improve user intuitiveness and ensure they more accurately reflect Turner’s people operations.
“Their team employs many seasonal, project-based staff, many of whom are contracted for multiple seasons within one year,” said Pip. “So their workforce templates need to account for more leave periods and a higher number of future employees. It’ll let Meg and her leaders make faster staffing decisions and improve their budgeting and forecasting accuracy.”
By connecting their dissociated data models, in particular their CapEx and workforce data—all stored securely in the Vena Cloud—Meg is establishing a single source of truth for Turner’s finance function. Before Vena, Turner’s users received an email with a PDF report at the end of each month. Now, their 57 Vena users have executive dashboards that grant real-time access—customized to their respective data permission level—for making quicker data-driven decisions.
“We can see all that in one place. And our users appreciate the ‘connectedness’ of that. It’s going to allow us this year to collapse our budget timeframe. It used to take us three months to do a budget,” said Meg. “By allowing people to have real-time access to their data, they have uncovered things. Those ‘wows’ are happening on the ground, not just at my level. Now all of a sudden, we see where we’re spending.”
Meg shared that working with Christine and Pip has elevated more than Turner’s templates and overall finance function. It’s also elevated her technical prowess, accelerating her holistic knowledge of the business as a newcomer.
“I'm not a SQL person. I'm an accountant. I'm a CPA. I like systems, I like data, I like all of this, but I'm more of a functional person than a technical person. So it's really helped me sharpen my game technically into those staging queries.” Meg said. “They've helped me learn and helped me with the lift. It’s just helped me learn about our business so much. We have a diverse type of business, so now we can see the whole budget in one place.”
The Turner team took quick notice of Meg’s early modernization wins.
The organization presented Meg with their 2022 Excellence and Innovation Award. The inscription on her diamond-shaped annealed glass trophy read: “In recognition of significant contribution to the Turner Organization through operational innovation”.
“It was a big vote of confidence from all the users. It was a peer-nominated award. So top to bottom, I feel a lot of affirmation that the organization really appreciates it, what Vena has done and what I've done to bring it to them.”
With an early win secured, Meg recognizes opportunities for further finance modernization. Meg has continued working with Christine and Pip to begin their AP automation. Then, she wants to integrate their hospitality accounting and bison inventory data into Vena.
Meg plans to use Vena for their account reconciliations and then explore how Vena Insights can support Turner with predictive analytics and AI-powered dashboards.
“People need to get comfortable with logging in for their information, self-service. Vena allowed me to do that,” she said. “It was no secret to anybody that we needed to update our systems as far as reporting and budgeting and forecasting. But people don't know what's possible until they see it demonstrated for them. So my job as a catalyst is to bring that in front of our leadership.”
She’s brought 57 users up to speed and ensured they’re using Vena to their “best advantage.” They’re at 100% user adoption.
“I'm hopeful that we've hooked our train to an engine that's going to allow us to change as we go. Not just as our business evolves and the workforce evolves, but as the markets evolve and our business lines change. The pandemic taught us all that nothing is for sure and we've got to be able to be responsive and pivot more quickly. And that's one of the things that Vena has allowed us to do.”