WHEN AN ECONOMIST DEVELOPS THE SOLUTION, HE SPEAKS THE LANGUAGE

Morten Hededal has been there. Before becoming a consultant at exacto, he had been in various finance departments at Maersk for more than 10 years, and he knows the challenges associated with the handling, provision and structuring of data:

"There are continuous changes that result in new requirements or wishes that can challenge the existing practice or result in the need to quickly generate and structure new data sets. It could be changes in the company structure, replacements in the management team or simply changes in the legislation on reporting", Morten Hededal explains.

According to Morten Hededal, he often experienced that this put a lot of pressure on the finance department's employees:

"It could occupy our time for several days. But it was time that we needed to do our – in quotation marks – real work. When almost the entire department was put out of action for such a long time, it was obviously unsustainable. That's why I started to take an interest in the process. I'm a trained economist, and that's what my tasks were focused on, but as a manager I was also keen to establish workflows and supporting processes that could make our task solving more efficient", says Morten Hededal and continues:

"It occurred to me that a large part of the problem was that we did not have a fixed and structured process for collecting the necessary data when we were asked to include some new ones to supplement the data sets, we were already using. We didn't necessarily know who possessed them, where they were stored and so on. Therefore, a detailed mapping of the organisation and the various data owners was the first step to create a good starting point. After that, it was a question of defining a process for how the right data should be requested."

From analogue to digital

When Morten Hededal began his work to establish better and more efficient processes and workflows for collecting and structuring data, it was still an analogue exercise using Excel sheets and having an employee as the person in charge who collected data from the company and the employees who contributed to the solution of the task. But as larger and larger parts of the company's operations were digitised and digital platforms were being available, Morten Hededal saw some new perspectives:

"It is clear that digitization provided completely new opportunities for optimization, efficiency and automation. Capabilities that could eliminate the resource- and time-consuming manual tasks associated with working in traditional Excel sheets. Another advantage was – I imagined – that it would facilitate collaborations in new and more agile ways."

From Maersk to exacto

According to Morten Hededal, it was these perspectives that got him interested in exacto:

"There were many who saw the new possibilities. There were companies that developed new tools, while some companies themselves tried to develop them in-house. However, the ones that showed the most promising results were exacto. They also had good insights into the fact that the implementation of a new digital solution had to be done with an understanding of how to work in, for example, a finance department: which requirements must be met and what role you play in the company. The partners themselves have a career history from the finance departments, and in this way, I knew that we would draw on the same experiences and speak the same language right from the start. That is why I decided to leave Maersk and join exacto in 2015."

From economist to economist

And the language combined with the professional history is, according to Morten Hededal, a great advantage in his work today:

"I have crossed over to the other side. From sitting as an economist with management responsibilities in a financial department, I now sit and design digital solutions to support the work of the financial departments. But I still have both an education and many years of work experience, where I have had exactly the tasks and responsibilities that my customers do. This means that we speak from the same starting point, and my customers do not have to explain to me what is up and down. I already know, and often I can have a basic model that is adapted to their needs ready before we start making the special adaptations that they need. It saves us a lot of time and means that they can get access to fairly good support shortly after we have started our collaboration", Morten Hededal concludes.