Swedish Logistic Property

SLP (Swedish Logistic Property) is a Swedish real estate company that acquires, develops and manages logistics properties. The company was founded in 2018 and has since then experienced a high pace of growth and acquisitions. To enable continued growth of the business without growing the organisation, there was a need to further streamline processes and deliver easily accessible data to the organisation. SLP engaged AddPro to implement a BI tool to make the data cloud-based and easily accessible to the entire organization.  

- It has been a WOW experience for everyone in the company, says Christoffer Widéen, Financial Controller and IT Manager at SLP.

Static reports and a lot of manual work

SLP is growing rapidly in terms of both number of properties and turnover. This growth requires the company to have systems and processes that are in line with being a modern and fast-paced property owner - something that the finance department's analytical tools have not been. The process of financial monitoring has previously been person-dependent and required a lot of manual work in different systems, which has both created a risk of handling errors and made data difficult to access.

- Previously, we produced static reports on a monthly basis," says Finance Manager Matilda Olsson. We in finance also had many issues to deal with on an ongoing basis. In order to make even better, data-driven decisions and act faster, we wanted to spend more time on analysis. We decided it was time to improve our processes and tools for follow-up. 

Implementation of automatic reporting tool 

In early 2022, SLP contacted AddPro. SLP had decided to implement Power BI, a reporting tool that allows everyone in the organization to easily pull updated data on a daily basis - without relying on the finance department.

- We had worked with AddPro before when implementing new financial and consolidation systems and we knew that they also had resources with deep expertise in Power BI, says Christoffer.

With high standards and an aggressive timetable, work started with a feasibility study in March followed by implementation. AddPro took on the role of project manager and IT consultant with the responsibility to implement the BI tool based on SLP's needs and wishes.

AddPro's solution was to automate the entire workflow while maintaining flexibility using a data warehouse in Microsoft Azure. With graphs, tables and charts in the Microsoft Power BI reporting tool, the user experience could also be optimised based on the desired data to support decision-making processes.

 - The purpose of the data warehouse was to collect relevant information from existing systems and to store, wash and refine, merge information between systems and prepare it for analysis, says AddPro's project manager Johan Falk. At the same time, rights to reports and the underlying data are controlled, determining what and how much information each user should have access to.

Great value throughout the organisation

With Power BI, everyone in the organisation can now see the whole or specific properties, compare data, find evidence down to invoice level and do their own analysis. The tool provides a whole new level of cost control and the integration has created value across the organisation by saving time, enabling more data-driven decisions and allowing SLP to act more quickly. Not least, the finance department saves time that they can use for more value-creating tasks.

- We used to spend a lot of time producing data and less time analysing it," says Matilda. Now we save time on data, which gives us more time to do more qualitative analysis.

User-friendly and future-proof solution

Despite an aggressive timetable, the implementation and collaboration has gone smoothly.

- We feel that everyone we have worked with at AddPro has been very knowledgeable and committed," says Matilda. Johan Falk has been a great help in building the reports because he has understood our wishes very quickly.

Internal reactions have also been positive.

- At the launch for the rest of the organisation, we showed them around the system, both how easily accessible the data was and how easy it was to customise the data to their own needs, and I got a 'WOW - this is good'," says Christoffer. 

The flexible data warehouse solution also allows SLP to connect more data sources and systems in the future.  

- We've really got our eyes on Power BI and how we can use it in the organisation. We will take this further and develop it internally, says Christoffer.