Empowering Data-Driven Clarity and Efficiency
DSCIM empowers businesses to achieve data-driven clarity and efficiency within Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) and beyond. We are your strategic partners in financial transformation, dedicated to bridging the gap between complex data and actionable, user-friendly insights.
Unlike firms offering a one-size-fits-all approach, DSCIM provides bespoke tailoring that ensures your Vena implementation fits perfectly with your business’s unique processes and needs. We optimize, automate, and future-proof your financial processes for long-term success.
Solving Your FP&A Challenges with Vena
Financial planning and analysis teams often struggle with disconnected data, inefficient workflows, and outdated templates, leading to slow and error-prone reporting. We eliminate these bottlenecks by customizing Vena, allowing you to make faster, smarter, and more data-driven decisions.
We provide end-to-end solutions for Vena implementation, data integration, and template optimization.
Our core areas of expertise include:
Data Integration
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We establish a fully automated Custom ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process that serves as a major differentiator. This process consolidates data from multiple, disparate sources (including ERP, CRM, and operational systems) directly into Vena accurately.
- We eliminate manual data entry and inconsistencies, providing a single source of truth for financial planning.
- Our approach is source system agnostic, meaning our ETL processes adapt to any ERP system, simplifying data mapping.
- Custom ETL processes guarantee automated, real-time data updates.
Vena Tailoring
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Vena is powerful only if it aligns with your specific financial structures. We customize every aspect of the Vena system to ensure it works exactly as you require.
- We define fully customized dimensions, hierarchies, and templates.
- We streamline your Vena setup to eliminate unnecessary complexity, allowing your team to focus on strategy.
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We leverage our expertise to ensure your templates are scalable, fast, and easy to use. Our methodology involves proactively improving performance and adherence to best practices.
- We audit, refine, and optimize templates to achieve maximum speed, accuracy, and usability.
- We enhance performance by leveraging advanced Excel 365 formulas, replacing volatile functions like VLOOKUP with non-volatile alternatives such as XLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH.
- Our Template Audit service provides a preventative maintenance check, ensuring templates remain structured and high-performing over time.
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We move FP&A processes from time-consuming and manual approaches to automated and data-driven solutions.
- We eliminate tedious manual work with fully automated workflows.
- We enable on-demand Vena refreshes, allowing users to trigger updates instantly without waiting for scheduled overnight jobs.
- We reduce errors and increase reporting accuracy through built-in validation rules.
Our Comprehensive Service Categories
We structure our services to address the specific needs and challenges of clients, regardless of where they are in their Vena journey (New Clients versus Existing Clients).
For New Customers
If you are new to Vena or looking to migrate from existing financial systems, we provide a structured and seamless onboarding experience.
We ensure a smooth and efficient Vena setup from day one. This involves a proven methodology that includes interviewing the finance team and future users, defining key data sources, outlining Vena cube dimensions and hierarchies, and providing a clear, actionable roadmap.
We establish a robust and automated ETL process from scratch, creating a unified data flow by connecting all disconnected data sources (e.g., SAP, Navision, SQL, Access servers). Our approach leverages a flexible, structured Vena Data Mart.
We preserve the familiar structure and feel of your existing Excel-based financial workflows while transforming them into fully optimized, Vena-enabled templates. This reduces dependency on Excel’s manual processes and improves overall performance.
For Existing Customers
If you are already using Vena but are facing challenges with data quality, speed, scalability, or template maintenance, our services ensure your financial processes remain agile and future-ready
ETL Related Solutions
These services enhance the core data processing environment, ensuring stability and performance.
We ensure a seamless transition to a new ERP system without disruptions to your Vena budgeting and reporting processes. Our ETL framework is designed to handle historical data complexities and map old and new ERP data structures.
We enable cross-functional budgeting and reporting by integrating new subject areas like Sales, Payroll, Inventory, and Operations into Vena. We use conformed dimensions in our scalable ETL architecture to link financial (GL) and operational data.
We provide flexible, user-triggered automation, empowering users to trigger refreshes on demand at any time during the workday, overcoming the limitations of standard Vena scheduling.
We eliminate ETL bottlenecks and optimize data flow to reduce refresh times from hours to minutes. This is achieved through techniques like incremental refresh, data volume analysis, and custom ETL processes optimized for speed.
We proactively ensure data accuracy and integrity by implementing a validation approach that detects and flags errors (e.g., missing values, inconsistencies) before they impact Vena reporting or cause ETL failures.
We unlock historical reporting capabilities by tracking changes in hierarchies and dimensions over time, using Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD Type 2), a solution not available in standard Vena. This ensures historical reports reflect past structures accurately.
Front End Related Solutions
These services focus on the user experience, usability, and performance of the Vena interface.
We conduct a comprehensive audit to standardize, consolidate, and optimize your existing Vena templates. A key success example involved reducing the number of templates for a client (Clay Lacy) from over 400 to just 35, significantly improving efficiency and reducing maintenance effort.
We refine and modernize Vena templates, ensuring they are built for long-term scalability and efficiency. We simplify complex formulas, improve calculation performance, and enhance the user experience by leveraging modern Excel 365 functions (e.g., XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA).
We provide flexible, user-triggered automation, empowering users to trigger refreshes on demand at any time during the workday, overcoming the limitations of standard Vena scheduling.
We eliminate ETL bottlenecks and optimize data flow to reduce refresh times from hours to minutes. This is achieved through techniques like incremental refresh, data volume analysis, and custom ETL processes optimized for speed.
We proactively ensure data accuracy and integrity by implementing a validation approach that detects and flags errors (e.g., missing values, inconsistencies) before they impact Vena reporting or cause ETL failures.
We unlock historical reporting capabilities by tracking changes in hierarchies and dimensions over time, using Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD Type 2), a solution not available in standard Vena. This ensures historical reports reflect past structures accurately.
The DSCIM Difference: Our Custom ETL Approach
Our standardized Vena ETL process is a product developed over years of client engagements, providing a universal framework that is customized for each client.
- Technology Foundation: Our ETL is built using SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio, offering greater scalability and power compared to proprietary Vena ETL tools (Integration Channels, Calculation Scripts). This approach ensures that clients with existing SQL Server licenses do not need to purchase additional software for development.
- Transparency and Maintainability: The architecture is transparent and logically structured using SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services), making it easier for clients to debug, support, and maintain the process themselves, as knowledge transfer is simplified compared to proprietary technologies.
- Scalability Beyond Vena: Our custom Data Mart (a mini Data Warehouse) can serve as an instant, consistent source of data for other reporting tools, such as Power BI or Tableau, alongside Vena Cloud. This is possible because all data, including actuals from ERP and budget data from Vena, is consolidated within the Data Mart.Who We Are
This focus on tailored solutions, technical excellence, and client empowerment ensures that Vena works harder and smarter for you.
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