Streamlining Budget Planning with Oracle DV: Latvenergo’s Marketing Department’s Digital Transformation

Latvenergo (established 1939), one of the largest companies in Latvia that specializes in generation of electricity and thermal energy, trade of electricity and natural gas in Baltics, and one of the first Scandic Fusion's customer, faced challenges within their Marketing department when it came to financial operational planning. Budget planning and expense tracking were managed manually in Excel, using data from multiple sources. This approach was time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies.

Recognizing the need for a more streamlined solution, the company’s marketing team reached out to their local IT department. Given Scandic Fusion’s strong track record of successful collaboration across multiple projects, the IT team recommended partnering with us to tackle the challenge.

Project goals: Moving from fragmented spreadsheets to a centralized, strategic planning solution

The primary objective of the project was to replace this fragmented approach with a user-friendly, centralized reporting solution tailored to support both day-to-day operational needs and long-term budget planning.

A secondary, but equally important, goal was to evaluate Oracle Data Visualization (DV) as a potential BI tool for the broader organization – for both Latvenergo and Scandic Fusion. This initiative served as a test case to explore the capabilities and limitations of Oracle DV - especially in comparison with other BI solutions like Microsoft Power BI.

The challenge

Marketing departments often manage dozens of active projects - some are small and self-contained, others complex and multi-layered, extending across quarters or calendar years. Plans change frequently, driven by evolving priorities and customer engagement dynamics.

In this case, marketing expenses were previously tracked and updated manually, requiring significant effort to consolidate and validate the data. This manual work created friction, especially when invoice amounts deviated from initial plans or when projects extended across financial years.

The challenge had three main components:

1. Aggregating and reconciling data from multiple sources, particularly from the internal accounting system.
2. Creating a system flexible enough to adjust project budgets based on incoming invoices or updated forecasts while maintaining consistency across time periods.
3. Improving visibility and control through a centralized, interactive reporting tool.

Scandic Fusion was approached to design a reporting solution that would merge accounting data with other operational inputs into a single, clear view tailored for financial decision-making.

The solution: a tailored reporting system with Oracle DV

Finding the right approach

The project began with a comprehensive pre-study and analysis phase, which took up about a third of the total project timeline. This extended analysis period was necessary because the financial processes within the Marketing department were complex, which required deeper exploration to ensure accuracy. While they had a quite clear vision of the end goal, understanding and mapping the existing financial data (particularly around accounts payable invoice information) required close collaboration between Marketing, Finance, and our team at Scandic Fusion. We acted as a bridge between departments, conducting multiple workshops, calls, and extensive email exchanges to ensure all requirements were fully captured and understood.

Choosing technology

During the early phase, we also evaluated whether Oracle DV – a tool in the customer’s ecosystem that had been available for some time but hadn’t been widely adopted or fully tested in practice - could meet the project’s needs. Since Latvenergo was already using Oracle technologies for data management, it made strategic sense to stay within the Oracle environment and explore DV as a potential solution. The pre-study showed that Oracle DV had the necessary capabilities, and both sides saw an opportunity to use this project as a pilot for testing the tool in real-world conditions. Our goal was twofold: to deliver a robust reporting solution and to explore Oracle DV’s potential for future use, both for this client and across other projects. For the customer’s IT team, this also provided valuable insights into DV’s integration potential within their broader BI strategy.

Implementation and collaboration

Once the foundation was in place, we moved into the development phase. Initial datasets were built in Oracle DV, followed by the first version of the report, which we presented for feedback. Based on this input, we iterated on both the data and the report design, also focusing on performance optimization and visual enhancements. Two more iterations followed, each shaped by customer feedback and internal workshops.

By the third iteration, the Marketing department had begun partly using the report in their daily operations. The final version was well-received and met all initial project goals. Additionally, the department is already considering future enhancements and new features to extend the solution’s value.

^“From the IT perspective, this project had two main objectives:
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1. To bring in an experienced external partner who could help deliver the budgeting and monitoring tool for the Marketing function on time and with high quality. Scandic Fusion’s deep knowledge of Latvenergo’s internal accounting processes played a crucial role in conducting an efficient initial analysis and ensuring the project's success.
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2. To explore, in more depth, the capabilities of the Oracle DV component for report development. By entrusting the report’s creation to Scandic Fusion, we’ve gained an excellent example of best practices in action.
_{Rolands Bērziņš, Head of Data Analytics & IT Project Manager at Latvenergo}

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Working with Oracle DV – key learnings

While Oracle DV fulfilled the core reporting requirements, the implementation also revealed some limitations of the 2023 version, which was the latest deployed at the customer’s end. A newer version of Oracle DV had been released, but it was not yet in use by Latvenergo during the project.

Some limitations and technical challenges we encountered included:

• Minor UI glitches and unexpected behaviors in report visuals.
• The absence of semantic models in the 2023 version, which made data modeling and metric reuse more complex.
• To enable interactive reports, we had to use data blending across multiple datasets - a method that worked but added technical complexity and performance considerations.

These hurdles were resolved through careful design, testing, and iterative improvements. The experience also deepened both teams’ knowledge of Oracle DV’s architecture and helped define what could be improved with a future version upgrade.

^"This project was a perfect blend of technical exploration and real business impact. Collaborating across departments helped us uncover needs that weren’t visible at first glance, and testing Oracle DV in a live setting gave us valuable insight for future BI projects.
_{Edgars Šilbergs, Data Analytics Consultant & Project Manager at Scandic Fusion}

Results: Improved accuracy, faster decisions, and reduced manual effort across the board

The resulting reporting solution enables the Marketing team to monitor spending by segment, track project progress, and drill down into individual invoices - all from a single source. Budget usage is automatically recalculated if actual costs differ from planned ones, and remaining allocations are adjusted accordingly across future months or years.

A dedicated control panel flags inconsistencies and validates outputs to improve trust in the data. Manual work is significantly reduced, and budget-related decision-making is now faster and more reliable.

^“With the implementation of the new budgeting system, we’ve significantly simplified our planning process, improved transparency, and saved a great deal of time for everyone in the Marketing function when working with budgets and invoice management.

To be honest, we learned a lot ourselves about the details of our accounting processes during the project, and many of the challenges only became clear as the work progressed. Scandic Fusion’s decision to begin with a thorough analysis was definitely the right one - it helped uncover all system elements and how they connect.

Despite the detailed initial research, we still needed to make several important adjustments during implementation. However, the project team was flexible, and the step-by-step approach we had planned proved to be effective - each iteration of the system kept improving. While the full rollout is still in progress, our colleagues have already started using the new solution because it allows us to do things we couldn’t before - or that previously took far too much time.
_{Raitis Streičs, Marketing Project Manager at Latvenergo}

Streamlined budgeting, proven BI potential, and a foundation for future innovation. This solution has notably enhanced the accuracy of marketing financial planning. With automated recalculation of planned expenditures and integration of multiple data sources into a unified reporting view, the Marketing team can now monitor financial targets more effectively and focus their efforts on core marketing activities instead of manual data wrangling and management.

As part of the project, we also had the opportunity to evaluate Oracle DV as a potential BI platform for broader use. While it doesn’t yet match the capabilities of market-leading tools like Microsoft Power BI, it proved to be a competent and improving solution for many reporting needs within the Oracle ecosystem.

In addition to the technical and business outcomes, the collaboration throughout the project was consistently constructive and well-aligned. Despite the complexity and somewhat evolving scope, communication with Latvenergo's project team remained clear, timely, and solution-focused. Their engagement and openness played a key role in keeping the project on track and allowed our team to adapt effectively when needed.

This project once again highlighted the strength of our collaboration with Latvenergo. We appreciate the trust they place in us and are eager to continue building on this partnership in future projects.

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