Valamis Group is an award-winning growth company that creates digital learning solutions for the likes of NASA Epic Challenge and Amadeus. When the company was founded, four friends worked in the same room. Today, this 170-person organization has offices in five countries. As the company grew, reporting and visibility to data become challenging.
In this interview, CEO Jussi Hurskainen and COO Esa Turunen describe the reporting and communications challenges of a growing company and how they've solved those.
Starting Point
To start off with, Jussi Hurskainen describes how the company evolved from an IT service company to a product company. This has completely changed the key business metrics. With growth, the company started to face challenges in communication and challenges in sharing joint information in the team.
“We had a lot of different information systems in place - and still do. The problem was that access to these systems was restricted to specific staff. In addition, we spent a lot of time compiling reports and there was a lot of delay.”
Challenges in reporting
challenges in communication between offices in different countries
visibility of shared information
reporting took a lot of time
delays in reporting
Real-time visibility for everyone
Esa Turunen, COO of Valamis, says he has used many different systems in the past to get data on sales, marketing, projects and the staff. In fact, the company woke up to the idea of a unified solution that could show everyone what's going on in the company in real-time.
“We started looking for a solution that would share all the information with our people,” Turunen describes.
"We wanted to show all everyone what is going on in the company in real-time."
Esa Turunen is the Chief Operating Officer of Valamis Group.
With Dear Lucy dashboards Valamis monitors a wide range of metrics: Sales is interested in goal completion and sales distribution. Marketing is interested in, for example, the number of new contacts, website traffic, and traffic sources. Human Resources tracks the number of people hired and left each month, the number of sick leave days and the average length of employment in the company. Deliveries, on the other hand, want to see overview of yearly billing, and the business areas and countries where the money comes from.
“All the dashboards were designed to be shared within the team in order to increase common understanding of where we are going as a company.”
Valamis has large TV screens in the offices to display real-time business numbers to keep the growing team up-to-date.
Pre-built integrations gave a head start
But how did the implementation of the new solution go and what have been the benefits in practice?
According to Hurskainen, the introduction of Dear Lucy started when two guys - Dear Lucy's Tommi and Rasmus - came to the office to show what other companies have measured. More than half of these metrics were also selected for Valamis.
Dear Lucy had already built integrations with part of the systems used at Valamis. This made it easier to choose Dear Lucy and quicker to implement the solution.
Real-time data changes day-to-day work
When it comes to impact of Dear Lucy, one big thing are the changes in the team’s working methods. Hurskainen says he has stopped drafting Excel sheets since he introduced Dear Lucy.
"I just to a web page where I can see all our numbers and their development."
In addition, people come to meetings well-prepared, as the same information is available to all at all times.
Turunen is especially happy with the fact that Dear Lucy allows to easily dig deeper into data. This is useful when more detailed information is needed of a particular area.
“By simply clicking the graphs, I can drill down into more detailed information. We have also used data to identify areas that we need to monitor more closely.”
At the same time, the team have analyzed why some numbers look like they do which has made it easier to take proper measures to fix them. Furthermore, monitoring business goals and progress by business area or country has brought visibility to the management team and the entire staff.
“Working with Dear Lucy has been easy.” Hurskainen sums up. “I appreciate quick response times and it’s usually been within minutes that I have gotten a response.”
Benefits of a Dear Lucy
time-savings - no more Excel reports
higher quality meetings as participants are better prepared
faster reaction times as information is immediately available
development areas are easier to identify
crucial details are easily found
transparency between country organisations has increased
Company: Valamis Group
Industry: Digital Learning Solutions
Personnel: 180
Founded: 2013
Geographic scope: Finland, UK, USA, Russia, Germany