Basware drives innovation and engagement for over 2,500 global customers with embedded analytics from Tableau
100 percent spend visibility delivered via single analytics platform
Insights gained help customers achieve ROI of 315 percent
Constant innovations in Tableau provide key competitive differentiator
Basware is a global provider of SaaS solutions that help businesses digitise their financial processes in order to drive compliance, facilitate better process automation and optimise overall data quality. The Finnish company supports 2,500+ customers across more than 175 countries, with net sales topping €151 million in 2020.
Basware uses Tableau embedded analytics to power its Basware Analytics solution, which gives customers a complete overview of their financial data, from procurement-to-payment (P2P), via a single, central platform. The resulting insights enable them to make faster, more informed decisions and streamline payment processes, delivering an average return on investment (ROI) of 315 percent.
Basware chooses Tableau as part of industry-leading ecosystem approach
Basware’s innovative P2P solution consolidates and automates finance and procurement functions across large IT environments, providing 100 percent visibility to customers on where their spend is going and exactly who they are doing business with.
“The majority of our customers are multinational organisations with over $500 million in revenues a year,” says Perttu Nihti, Chief Product Officer, Basware. “The large-scale nature of their operations means their data landscapes have become increasingly fragmented over time. This, combined with high external spend and invoice volumes, makes it harder and harder for them to maintain a comprehensive view of operations, or uncover key insights hidden within their data.”
By centralising their systems through Basware’s P2P suite, customers can once again achieve the oversight they need to optimise operational efficiency, with key insights delivered via Basware Analytics, powered by Tableau.
We chose Tableau as part of our ecosystem approach, which sees us partner with industry-leading experts wherever we feel it is most beneficial to do so, based on key criteria such as time to market, innovation, future proofing and TCO,” adds Perttu. “Basware excels in deriving insights from data and giving it to customers, while Tableau excels in creating the tools and platform needed to do so, which is why the partnership made perfect sense.
An all-in-one analytics solution fully integrated into Basware P2P
Basware Analytics is fully integrated into Basware’s P2P suite, utilising Tableau embedded analytics to provide customers with vital business intelligence in key operational areas. These include ‘spend insights’, which break down current spending and help build high performance supply chains, ‘process insights’, which identify process inefficiencies and bottlenecks, and ‘financial insights’, which enable accurate forecasting of committed spend. Customers can also view the impact of invoicing activity on their carbon footprint and receive data driven recommendations for how to reduce it.
“A recent total economic impact analysis found that our P2P solution has an average payback time of just 11 months, with ROI in the region of 315 percent,” notes Perttu. “This would be impossible to achieve without 100 percent visibility on both spending and processes, which further emphasises the power of embedded analytics and the huge impact it has on our customers’ businesses.”
Tableau driving continuous innovation as pandemic refocuses customer priorities
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has made it more important than ever for organisations to know exactly who they are doing business with. This includes everything from finding new opportunities and optimising spending to negotiating contracts and establishing strong relationships with suppliers. Having complete visibility of both direct and indirect spending is fundamental to all of this, making accurate analytics essential.
Our goal with Basware Analytics is to provide procurement and account payable teams all over the world with a cutting edge out-of-the-box analytics solution that would otherwise be too costly to produce in-house,” says Perttu. “Tableau plays a central role in realising this goal, not only because of its powerful analytics capabilities, but also because it’s intuitive nature allows us to continually innovate in terms of what we can offer our customers.
Recent features to be added include a ‘payment performance analysis’ dashboard, which lets customers analyse how long it takes to pay suppliers and identify/resolve any unnecessary delays. New ‘committed spend analytics’ also enables customers to build predictive capabilities for spend, including purchase orders, standing orders, invoices and more. All of this is curated through a single Tableau dashboard, providing a unified view that helps finance teams understand their ongoing currency exposure and cash reserve needs.
We operate in a highly competitive marketplace, which means we need to be constantly looking ahead and finding innovative new ways to give our customers a competitive edge,” concludes Perttu. “Our partnership with Tableau allows us to do this every day, giving us the differentiator we need to remain the leading e-procurement solution in the world.