Vena Planning Platform Review
What was your company’s primary use case for Vena Solutions?
We selected Vena after undergoing a thorough platform evaluation of other competing products that support the Real Estate market requirements. Our previous budgeting platform had grown in complexity and cost, and we needed a simpler, more cost-effective solution that integrated with our other platforms and move support away from IT and toward the business users.
Our requirements included Multifamily/property level, Capex, Corporate and Workforce level planning and integrating to several outside data sources.
What do you like most about Vena Solutions?
We are currently in the process of rollout out the platform - but initial feedback has been very positive. The platform is essentially a data warehousing platform that has an Excel front-end - which has helped with adaption, and for excel power users to be quickly create a number of input and reporting templates.
As someone with a background implementing and supporting a number of different technologies, I love the simplicity of the Vena development methodology - which doesn't require learning programming languages or additional development tools. The Vena excel add-in allows super users to map, analyze, and trace everything from within an excel workbook.
The input templates can allow for users to add line-item level details, drill into transactions, add comments - all of which our end-users love.
More advanced data modeling, workflow and admin functions happen on a web based portal - which is intuitive and in line with other enterprise level planning tools.
What could Vena Solutions do better?
Coming from a large, publicly traded company, I'm used to rigorous source/version control that allow for developers to lock files, check them in when completed, and do migration between various development, test and production environments. This isn't a requirement for my current organization and hasn't impacted our implementation at all - but for larger enterprises, additional controls and process may be necessary.
That said, Vena does save versions of the information that's being inputted from the end users, which can be very useful when tracing and determine how information was created and changed throughout the planning process.
Who would you recommend Vena Solutions to?
Absolutely
Customer support and service
Our experience has been very positive at all levels for the organization. We have worked closely with the consulting team during the design, build and implementation phases. We are just now starting to engage with production support team - we have subscribed to a higher level of support that provides dedicated resources hours - but all indications are that this will continue to be an excellent experience.
Value for money
Our analysis scored Vena highly compared to other platforms. As we continue to adopt and embrace the platform, I envision the value continuing to increase - we're paying for a platform that we can continue to build new data models/templates that go beyond our initial requirements, and their partnership with Microsoft Technologies allows for additional integrations/reporting.
Ease of onboarding
Have received many positive comments from the end users, because of the fact that it's based in Excel. We have worked to streamline the number of templates as well, but the fact that this is built into a tool they're already familiar with has helped with the adaption.
Compatibility with your existing solutions
Vena is built upon a data warehousing technology, and supports the creation of staging tables, ETL process, and mapping/calculation capabilities. We have been able to extract data our of our SQL server and other data sources to integrated into our financial and workforce planning cubes - files are csv based and can use Power Automate or a Vena Java Scripting tool to automate the end-to-end processes.