Innovad is an international producer of natural, research-driven additives for animal health and nutrition. Operating in over 70 countries with around 200 employees, Innovad combines global reach with a focus on high-quality, science-based solutions.
With a highly decentralized sales structure, Innovad manages a complex portfolio of products and customers. Its international operations involve diverse local processes, multiple currencies, and significant variation in product names and master data.
Until recently, the budgeting process was entirely Excel-based, making it susceptible to errors and extremely time-consuming:
- Over 20 separate Excel files circulated globally
- Payroll data and sales budgets were maintained in stand-alone files
- Product names varied by country or region, with no central structure
- Budgeting was done only once a year because the process took almost three months, leaving little room for forecasting
- The finance team spent weeks collecting, validating, and consolidating data
- Communication relied on emails and ad-hoc calls, with no centralized overview
Innovad recognized that this approach was unsustainable but struggled to find a tool that offered both the flexibility of Excel and the granularity needed to plan at product, customer, country, and packaging levels. Until Ufinity introduced Farseer.
During an initial demo, Farseer, together with our consultant Stijn, built a model in just three days that covered 80% of Innovad’s requirements. This quickly built confidence to proceed with full implementation.
The benefits for Innovad:
- A flexible, tailor-made data model scalable for future needs
- Import, visualize, and update actuals in seconds
- Globally centralized sales data: no more Excel files, emails, or copy-paste workflows
- Role-based access control, ensuring employees can only view or edit their own data
- A unified master data structure with standardized local product names
- Multi-currency support with automatic recalculation
- Familiar “Excel logic” without the associated risks: formulas cannot be overwritten, and outdated versions are eliminated
- Budgeting by month, quarter, or year, with full drill-down P&L visibility
- Reliable, group-wide reporting
As Farseer’s trusted implementation partner, Ufinity led the deployment. Our consultant Stijn coordinated the entire process. Due to internal delays, Innovad had a tight timeline, making speed critical. The project was intensive but highly efficient.
After three days of on-site workshops to define scope, logic, processes and reporting requirements, a ten-week implementation followed, structured in sprints. The data model was built and refined step by step. Stijn assisted in cleaning and aligning master data and served as a bridge between business, IT, finance, and Farseer. Implementation concluded with a week of training, enabling Innovad to independently manage the platform with customized manuals.
The first budgeting round with Farseer has been completed, with positive feedback:
- Budgeting reduced from nearly three months to a fraction of that time
- Master data is fully streamlined and standardized
- Finance no longer spends time on manual consolidation
- Sales can view historical data, budgets, and forecasts in a single platform
- Management has immediate insight into margins, volumes, geographic distribution and trends
- Innovad can now run multiple forecasts per year thanks to a centralized setup
Planned expansions include HR planning (including complex local payroll structures), CAPEX planning, marketing projects, and additional P&L components.
Farseer’s implementation at Innovad demonstrates how an international organization with complex budgeting needs can gain control over its planning and reporting processes. The strong collaboration between Farseer, Ufinity and Innovad’s finance team transformed a fragmented Excel-ecosystem into a modern, efficient, and scalable FP&A platform.
Today, Innovad benefits from faster processes, greater flexibility, higher data quality, and a tool that grows with the company’s future plans.
