Dr.techn. Olav Olsen is a Norwegian engineering consultancy of 150 to 200 people, with offices in Lysaker, Bergen, Trondheim and Ålesund. Its engineers design buildings, transport infrastructure, dams, ports, offshore and aquaculture structures and renewable energy plants. The firm is part of the Artelia Group.
Finance data sat in the ERP, time in an older on-premise system and project status in spreadsheets. The firm now uses Hebno to pull all three together.
“We used to find out about overruns two weeks after closing the month. Now our project managers see budget burn within days, and our write-offs are well down.”
Heidi Algarheim
CFO, Dr.techn. Olav Olsen
The challenge
Every month, controllers exported data from each system and joined it by hand before they could report to management and to the group. This took well over a week. Project managers on long assignments, from concept studies to follow-up during construction, learned about overruns weeks after the fact, when it was too late to agree a change with the client.
Client progress reports were written by hand from project files, and unbilled hours sat too long before they were invoiced.
Why Hebno
Hebno connects to the systems the firm already has, so there was no replacement project. Controllers and project managers ask plain-language questions about budget burn, unbilled hours and utilisation by section and office.
Reports come out in the firm’s existing format, with numbers that match across finance and projects.
How the team uses Hebno
Finance uses Hebno to consolidate data and produce monthly project, section and group reports. Project managers get budget burn alerts and follow up on unbilled time, and engineers use it to draft client progress reports.
The result
Monthly reporting now takes two days instead of more than a week. Write-offs are down by about a third, and each person saves around 6 hours a week.
