Powering transformative financial and project planning at Vena Energy

As a leading Independent Power Producer (IPP) of renewable energy in the Asia-Pacific region, Vena Energy has enjoyed double-digit growth in energy generation, revenue, and EBITDA. To support its next stage of expansion, Vena Energy needed to transform its financial processes on a new technology platform to meet the growth.

The company had taken an initial implementation with Anaplan and realized that the platform was ideal for the project. The raw data, definitions, and structure were normalized and imported into Anaplan, and a unified asset register was created to track Vena Energy’s renewable energy projects across eight jurisdictions.
 

Start in core finance, then expand

The team at Vena Energy then built core financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and consolidations models on that data foundation, and later extended their use of Anaplan beyond finance to include a human resources model for headcount and compensation forecasting, as well as tracking models for sustainability and health and safety data. “Anaplan enables us to track key metrics and performance indicators at a glance, which facilitates the deployment of vital resources where they are needed the most,” said Sam Ong, Vena Energy’s Chief Finance Officer.

They also created a project planning model for the many capital projects that fuel Vena Energy’s growth. Across the Asia-Pacific region, Vena Energy owns and maintains 58 operating solar and wind energy projects, in addition to more than 30 renewable energy projects under construction and more than 100 projects in the development pipeline. For each project, Vena Energy tracks progress over time against the budget in Anaplan. Planners know when a project will begin contributing to revenue; they also can understand the financial impacts when a project gets behind schedule or approaches budget limits and recommend immediate corrective action.

The project planning model also tracks project insurance premiums and claims—critical levers for risk mitigation when projects cost tens of millions of dollars—and allocates human resources using a heat map to balance resources and utilities. “With Anaplan, we have a complete and accurate picture of our capital projects, no matter where they are in development,” Ong says.
 

Explosive data growth calls for HyperModels

With this rich data on the Anaplan platform, Vena Energy’s monthly consolidation time dropped significantly. But a new challenge arose: the consolidations model quickly became very large, and the workarounds that kept the model size manageable reduced data granularity and availability.

In response, the Vena Energy team adopted HyperModels, Anaplan’s large-model technology. This enabled Vena Energy to add hierarchies, list items, and subgroups, along with an additional year of historical data, to its financial models. The conversion was completed in days without altering model structure or logic. “HyperModels are really helpful and save us a lot of time,” Ong says. “It’s been key to supporting Vena Energy’s growth.”

Data is now more accessible, and more useful. Vena Energy’s corporate and country managers consume data in Anaplan using Microsoft Power BI, so they can visualize how projects and assets are performing compared to plan.