Olympus’s regional headquarters for the EMEA region faced the challenge of making a highly complex planning landscape future-proof. The early strategic decision to adopt Board laid the foundation for digital finance. Step by step, financial planning became the core of a modular expansion path that increased transparency, reduced manual effort, and improved the company’s ability to manage its operations.
Working closely with Board partner celver, Olympus Europa SE & Co. KG has continuously refined the solution. In this way, the company has established coordinated planning as a sustainable, adaptive process.
Why This Story Matters
- Shows how the right platform decision can enable long-term scalability in enterprise planning.
- Illustrates the journey from fragmented Excel processes to connected enterprise planning.
- Demonstrates how Finance can lay the groundwork for Digital Finance and cross-functional performance management.
- Shows how a modular approach to expansion makes planning future-ready.
- Provides a real-world example of how planning can become a continuous, evolving process.
The Company
Olympus Europa serves as the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) headquarters of its Japanese parent company. As a global medical technology company, Olympus works closely with healthcare professionals to deliver innovative solutions and services for the early detection, diagnosis, and minimally invasive treatment of diseases. In doing so, Olympus aims to raise standards of care for certain conditions and improve patient outcomes.
Key Learnings
- Financial planning provides a solid starting point for connected enterprise planning.
- A robust data model is essential for scalability and future expansion.
- Modular expansion reduces complexity and drives adoption across business functions.
- Building on familiar ways of working eases change management and accelerates adoption and usage.
Frank Griese
We made a strategic decision to invest in a planning platform back in 2015. Over the years, that decision has paid off. We can keep adding new modules and immediately benefit from existing data models and datasets.
Challenge – High Complexity and Growing Demands
As early as 2015, Olympus EMEA’s planning landscape was characterized by considerable organizational and data complexity. Its regional headquarters had to bring together numerous countries, planning levels, and business functions in a single process while meeting strict requirements set by the parent company.
Historically, planning relied on Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. Each country maintained numerous files and versions, which required substantial manual effort to consolidate. Last-minute changes, top-down targets, and version management placed additional pressure on headquarters and increased the risk of errors.
As requirements from the parent company increased and a new ERP system was introduced, data volumes continued to grow. Existing tools reached their limits: visibility into the current planning status was limited, coordination across countries and organizational levels was cumbersome, and planning tied up significant resources for weeks at a time.
At the same time, planning was becoming an increasingly important tool for managing the business—not only within Finance, but also for coordinating activities across regions and functions. This created a need for a scalable, consistent planning platform.
Solution – A Scalable Platform for Connected Planning
Olympus chose Board early on as its planning platform, with the aim of gradually moving beyond isolated processes and establishing planning as an enterprise-wide performance management process.
Board’s performance and flexibility—including the ability to adapt functionality easily and independently—were key factors in the decision. Equally important were celver’s extensive project experience (when the company was still known as SDG) and its deep expertise in planning and business processes.
The close partnership with celver throughout implementation and ongoing development was instrumental in building a planning architecture that was sound from a business perspective and scalable from a technical one. The project team deliberately adopted a modular approach that could be continually adapted to changing requirements.
“Following detailed requirements definition and process modeling, we implemented a comprehensive system for profit and loss, balance sheet, and capital expenditure planning. The benefits became clear as soon as financial planning went live. Around 100 divisional controllers were able to plan much more efficiently,” recalls Dennis Stahl, Business Unit Lead CFO at celver.
Financial Planning as the Core Capability
Financial planning was the starting point. Profit and loss, balance sheet, and capital expenditure planning were linked in Board and supported by structured workflows. Planning steps can be organized, locked, and carried forward consistently—from initialization through to handover to downstream processes.
“Our financial planning cycle lasts more than six months. We start with bottom-up planning, receive top-down targets, and then go through several rounds of revisions. It always depends on whether global events trigger further changes,” explains Frank Griese, who is responsible for the ongoing operation of the Board solution.
Board supports the entire planning cycle through a multi-stage combination of bottom-up planning, top-down targets, and iterative adjustments.
The platform brings the different elements of financial planning together into a holistic view. Revenue and cost planning, capital expenditure and depreciation, and balance sheet and liquidity projections are connected through aligned planning logic. This makes financial impacts and dependencies visible, providing a reliable basis for informed decisions and proactive business management.
Seamless Integration of Specialized Planning Processes
Building on financial planning, Olympus gradually extended the solution to additional planning areas. HR and headcount planning, cost center planning, and capital expenditure planning each address their own specific requirements and processes while remaining tightly integrated with the financial structures. Workforce changes feed directly into financial plans and are automatically reflected in the profit and loss statement and balance sheet.
“This transformed planning from a purely financial discipline into a connected, cross-functional process,” explains Frank Griese.
Transparency, Simulation, and Collaboration
A central feature of the solution is visibility into scenarios, planning status, and business impacts. Users can analyze different scenarios, account for seasonality, and run simulations without relying on external files or manual calculations.
A shared data foundation enables controllers at country, regional, and headquarters levels to work with the same figures simultaneously and collaborate directly on the underlying data.
“Board is excellent for interactive allocation processes. Things that used to create circular references in Excel are no problem in Board. We can model allocations interactively and with full traceability,” says Frank Griese.
Continuous Evolution Rather Than a Static Solution
New requirements, changing business models, and additional planning areas can be developed further and integrated into Board incrementally.
“The application is never truly finished. You keep learning throughout the process and questioning whether the current approach is still the right one. Board’s flexibility allows us to keep our planning processes up to date,” says Frank Griese.
Griese also points to new Board capabilities that Olympus has introduced, such as Flexgrid: “Many planners, particularly in Finance, are very familiar with Excel. Flexgrid lets us meet them where they are and makes the transition to Board easier. I have familiar features, such as pivot functionality, but I’m working with the data and data models centrally maintained in Board. That significantly increases acceptance of the platform.”
Dennis Stahl
Moving away from isolated Excel silos to a planning platform has made a real difference at Olympus. Planning is no longer a marathon of back-and-forth coordination; it is now a transparent, collaborative process for managing business performance.
Benefits – Greater Transparency and Better Business Control
“We made a strategic decision to invest in a planning platform back in 2015. Over the years, that decision has paid off. We can keep adding new modules and immediately benefit from existing data models and datasets,” says Frank Griese.
The Board platform has delivered tangible improvements throughout Olympus’s planning process:
- Significantly Less Manual Work – Key steps such as initialization, calculation, and consolidation are automated. Manual tasks, copying, and coordination effort have been substantially reduced. “Initialization used to involve a great deal of manual effort, with the risk of copy-and-paste errors. Today, that source of error has been eliminated, and the time required has fallen dramatically,” explains Frank Griese.
- One Consistent, Transparent View of Planning – Planning progress, versions, and scenarios are fully traceable at any time. Everyone works with consistent data across countries, regions, and organizational levels.
- Greater Consistency Across Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Capital Expenditure – Because the individual plans are linked within the system, changes automatically flow through all relevant areas. Disconnected processes and retrospective corrections are substantially reduced.
- Better Control Over Changes and Revisions – Multiple rounds of revisions, top-down targets, and adjustments can be managed in a structured way without manually rebuilding existing plans.
Ready for the Future
Olympus is also looking ahead to the latest enhancements to Board and the potential future use of Board-specific AI agents.
“I already have specific use cases in mind where AI will definitely help us move forward. And in celver, we have a reliable partner with the expertise to support us in implementing them,” says Frank Griese.
Conclusion
The Olympus case study shows how an early strategic decision to adopt a planning platform can deliver long-term value. Rather than optimizing planning in isolation, the company created a scalable foundation on which Enterprise Planning and Digital Finance can evolve incrementally.
With Board, Olympus has transformed planning from a manual, fragmented process into a consistent tool for managing business performance—aligned across countries, functions, and planning levels. Its modular approach made it possible to start with financial planning and continuously adapt the solution to new requirements without disrupting existing structures.
Sustainable planning solutions are not built through one-off system changes. They depend on sound architectural decisions, iterative development, and consistent involvement from business teams. That is where the long-term value of a modern planning platform lies: it provides the foundation for better-aligned enterprise decisions.
