
Kverneland Bil AS is one of Norway’s leading automotive vehicle distributors. The car dealer sells various brands, including Ford, Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, Land Rover, Fiat, Fiat Professional, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, and MG. The company started in 1921, making it nearly as old as the modern car, and has a long and traditional history. In 2021 Kverneland Bil celebrated its centennial birthday.
Today, the Kverneland Bil group holding has around 250 employees. In 2021 Kverneland Bil expects sales of almost 7,000 cars and NOK 2.5 billion (more than USD 280 million) in turnover. The group is one of the largest car dealers and the leading seller of Ford, Mazda, and Volvo in Norway.
Kverneland Bil’s business controller, Merete Tisløv, talks about how the company uses financial planning solutions from Profitbase to make the best decisions for the dealership’s financial growth strategy.
When Tisløv started working at Kverneland Bil in the fall of 2010, she was an experienced user of the Profitbase digital program from a previous job. Plus, Kverneland Bil was already using a Profitbase budgeting and simulation system ‘SIM’ and a data warehouse from another supplier.
The solution Kverneland Bil had, using the data warehouse from another supplier at the time, required a great deal of manual work – punching numbers in Excel reports. “We had to input the numbers manually. Alternatively, Profitbase could transfer them for us,” Tisløv says.
The main challenges:
Tisløv reveals that it’s necessary to find the best technology to follow the market. In addition, there was a need for streamlining through daily reports instead of fortnightly reports to increase transparency and efficiency. The financial team needed reports that were clear and easy to read, particularly production analysis reports (these reports make it easy to plan staffing costs and other costs).
“Car importers have their own data warehouses, but these are only for Ford or Volvo and cannot be combined with our financial cube or other brands,” she says.
“Our ‘aha moment’ happened when Kverneland Bil received an offer from Profitbase to help us further develop our technological development. The solution involved, among other things: collecting data from the various sources, compilation, quality assurance, and providing a set of reports for ongoing reporting. Complete overview and insight.
In 2011, Kverneland Bil started using InFront and WebPlan from Profitbase. The team worked in parallel with reports in Excel. “Nowadays, we have just one Excel report,” says Tisløv, referring to the reduction of Excel reports after applying the Profitbase solutions. “Kverneland Bil is delighted with the Profitbase solutions. Our finance staff uses InFront for account reporting and Profitbase Planner to create budgets and forecasts.”
The full case study can be found on Profitbase’s website.