Building and launching our new global Finance Platform in 100 days

TL;DR: This post will take you through some of the reasons for Oda’s finance platform transformation, the implementation process, learning and most importantly, how happy were we with our investment once live.

At Oda, we typically don’t shy away from big challenges, and in early 2023 we landed on the decision to invest in technology that would form the foundation for our new finance platform. The goal was that the platform would enable us to design scalable solutions and processes in Finance, fit for global scale. We were, quite frankly, in desperate need of replacing a range of sub-optimal and ineffective duck-tape solutions that we had grown out of, years ago.

We were wearing boots that were way too small

Taking back control over the quality of our work and ability to collaborate cross-market was becoming immensely important for many reasons. Not only were people getting exhausted, but we were slowing down for the wrong reasons, and our inability to work effectively not only reduced our ability to scale, but it also reduced our ability to collaborate and change continuously, iteratively and coherently across the markets we were operating in.

With many of our technical solutions being outsourced — or not fit for our scale — our ability to change was nearly impossible to find out, putting us in a position where we constantly felt surrounded by too many unknown unknowns. Our systems were built for small businesses, something we can no longer consider ourselves to be, and we had little insight into why most processes worked the way they did (they just did somehow over time).

Workday as our new finance platform core

In early 2023, after months assessing possible SaaS partners for our finance platform needs, we landed on Workday. A lot of the rationale was connected to the platform’s ability to serve and be customized to fit any local market need we might have in the future. In addition, we would combine and share core data structures in the company with our People teams who, in 2021, had implemented the Human Capital Management modules (HCM) to replace old HR technology. The fact that Workday is a global system that is customizable for multi-market set-ups and that it utilizes the power of worker data made its combined platform unbeatable for our growing needs.

Getting the ball rolling

I took on the lead role of project management for the whole platform implementation in early March 2023. One of my first tasks was to move us from a state of too many unknown unknowns to more known unknowns. This would set up the work to follow for success. I wanted to find out what we needed to know so that we could learn and discover as we went along in the project. Having all the answers upfront was never a goal, but rather to get enough information to scope and align on the broad strokes of upcoming work well.

Coming from a more technical environment, the natural first steps for me were to gain an understanding of the current system landscape, what the platform needed to deliver on, its process, discovery of any key constraints the business had, and to identify the people who would form part of my core team. By the end, there were some key outcomes we wanted to achieve:

1. Ensure Oda gets paid by its customers and pays its suppliers the right amount at the right time;
2. Ensure employees who make cash outlays on behalf of the company have credit to pay or get reimbursed;
3. Complete monthly closing and reporting to discuss performance and future outlook internally when the numbers are relevant, as early as possible in the month, ideally day 4, and not 8; and
4. Ensure final closing of books and reporting to tax authorities and other stakeholders.

Sound simple enough?

As we started up the project our scope was to:

• Replace our core accounting system incl. ledger account structures;
• Replace our employee expenses and reimbursement system;
• Acquire and implement a new eInvoice tool;
• Rebuild our invoice management system to fit new data structures;
• Convert all business asset, customer and supplier master data as well as our beginning balances; and
• Build completely new integrations from scratch between the new accounting system to eight other systems; such as to the bank, invoice management system, internal data warehouse, eInvoice processor, currency exchange data, tax authorities etc.

This would total 20+ individual integrations if you consider all inbound and outbound integrations. Oh, and we have daily operations transacting with nearly 1,200 suppliers, approximately 30,000 invoices per year, and pretty decent revenue from our large active customer base shopping at Oda.com weekly. So, significant downtime was not really an option when going live.

Could we leave some of it for later? Not really. We couldn’t really perform one individual thing without some of these dependencies coming into play. To reach our ambition, and to make significant investments and innovations in our platform, we needed a suite that interacted smoothly and effectively from day one.

Managing a project for a successful on-time launch

Starting a project this size, with a team that has not been very involved in technology transformation was a big ask. Not only did we expect them to be involved, we needed everyone to break down their daily operational processes and redesign them to fit new technology, but also fundamentally improve them.

In order to set the project up for success, we had to fully accept one of our core constraints: namely, that we had no full-time dedicated resources available for the implementation project other than the myself as lead. The rest of the Finance team were fully operational in their day-to-day jobs, and resource availability was immediately addressed as one of the project risks and key focus areas to continuously mitigate.

Our small, lean project team, comprising a handful of skilled resources, was highlighted early on as one of the key project risks. But I had no other option, or people, as they all were critical operational resources during financial processes like monthly closing, payroll and so on. It meant that together, the management team and I had to develop an implementation plan around these periods to ensure deep focus work and time invested to the project in the second half of each month. Managing both time and expectations clearly allowed people to let go of thinking about the work when it wasn’t explicitly focus time — reducing some cognitive load.

Lessons that were critical to adopt to continuously

Although we had a clear timeline and milestones to deliver on during the projects, I couldn’t say it wasn’t a rollercoaster of challenges, change, learning and some failures.

Emotions, team well-being, continuous feedback, iteration and adoption were critical factors in the management of the project, and to get us to the finish line. Here are some important lessons I learned that I’d like to share with you:

• Have a clear timeline and deliverables, yes, but don’t shy away from making smaller adjustments. We pushed back our end-to-end start by 4 weeks to address some critical issues with our ledger accounts supporting data structures.
• A small autonomous team that could make decisions on the go was one of our super-powers, and management had to be comfortable with that (and they were!). We would validate and sign off changes continuously, and iterating as we learned and discovered in testing.
• We had cross-functional resources with core competencies in project and change management, engineering and finance, but we fully accepted that there was an area where we needed support and engaged relevant subject matter experts. In our case, we wanted support on Tax, and engaged Deloitte with both tech and legal advice to validate our design and solution for tax defaulting and reporting.
• We worked together, not in silos. We started by distributing some work with the goal to lower cognitive load on individuals, only to come into our first testing unable to see the full picture of our platform, resulting in a lot of uncertainty and concern if we had covered all our needs. We made some important adjustments and embraced a more resource-heavy approach, did all testing together during end-to-end testing, which gave us significantly more understanding, speed and confidence in what we had built together.
• Iterating and changing on the go is always good, and we applied this to all elements of the project: how we worked together, how much or little support we required, meeting frequency and agendas. We made everything that had a supporting function in the project relevant and optimal for what we are trying to achieve.

My experience is that this is often enabled by support from management, a culture where learning, progress, failures and iterative work is celebrated equally, and the team feels both empowered and accountable.

Are we happy with the results of our new platform?

Overall, yes! There is no hiding from the fact that we have implemented more advanced technology to support our processes with automation, and that results in us having to step up our game in terms of maintenance and continuous improvement. But we now have a fully reviewed and scalable platform in place, which has improved our ability to govern our financial data and reliably reconcile across the group. New and improved processes and ways of working also improve user experience, cost effectiveness and collaboration.

In addition, combining and building a strong connection between our Human Capital Management module, filled with valuable worker data of already high maturity and maintenance would inherently enable us to truly innovate and rebuild strong foundations based on core data and automations. One of our clearest examples of the true power of the connected People and Finance platforms is our expenses and reimbursement processes, which is now live as an end-to-end process in one system. This replaces a system landscape and situation that required the Finance team to spend 15 minutes per expense, on average, which is now down to 1–3 minutes for most expenses.

If we look at not only system architecture, but also team growth and development, we can celebrate a great success story too. Having team members undergo the process from start to finish has increased their understanding of the role they play, not only in doing their daily operational job, but also exploring ways to innovate, remove toil and build scalable solutions. This includes taking multiple elements of financial accounting, tax, and reporting into consideration at the same time.

What lies ahead, post-go-live?

Following an 8-week post-production support period, we reached something we can be proud to call a steady state we can learn and iterate on as part of our daily operation. By making a large investment to insource and invest in technology, we’ve also inherently taken it upon ourselves to review and tune our operating model to fit the new scope and responsibilities. This will ensure we continue to optimize the platform with clear roles and accountability, as well as carry out important maintenance to preserve and care for our platform and its performance.

Special thanks to Carl-Fredrik Iuell Bergan and

Vegard Vik

for the support and trust in navigating the team and changes during the project.