Industry: Biotech & Life Sciences
Revenue: $180M
Team Size: 500+ globally
Geographies Covered: Nine countries across Europe, the Middle East, and the US
About Altium
Altium operates in the biotech and life sciences sector, where it plays a crucial role as a distributor of laboratory instruments, consumables, and comprehensive service packages.
With a focus on research institutes, pharmaceutical companies, and government organizations, Altium supports some of the most rigorous and advanced scientific fields.
Altium has always maintained a strong commitment to quality, consistently achieving high standards in its financial planning and reporting. However, as the company grew, its highly skilled and efficient team recognized the opportunity to enhance their already exceptional performance by adopting more streamlined and effective processes.
Each entity operated with a certain level of independence, which presented an opportunity to enhance alignment and introduce a more standardized framework for financial oversight. As Altium expanded, the growing complexity of reporting across multiple geographies highlighted the value of a more cohesive financial structure. The CFO, Ivan Jurković, and his team, committed to excellence, sought to unify data from various regions, departments, and currencies to deliver even more timely and accurate insights. Altium partnered with Farseer to elevate their financial processes, ushering the organization into a new era of efficiency and cohesion.
Challenges
As Altium expanded its operations across nine countries, the increasing scale brought opportunities to enhance its financial processes. Each regional entity operated effectively, but their independence highlighted the potential for greater alignment in financial reporting. Variations in formats and processes across entities underscored the need for a more streamlined approach to consolidate data efficiently and support leadership in making timely, data-driven decisions.
Manual processes required significant effort from the finance team, whose exceptional skills ensured accuracy and reliability despite the repetitive nature of tasks like data gathering, updating, and validating in Excel. While these methods had supported smaller-scale operations effectively, the team’s ambition to focus on higher-value strategic activities highlighted the need for a more efficient solution. Their commitment to excellence left little room for inefficiency, driving the desire for tools that would enable more proactive planning and innovation.
Forecasting added another layer of complexity. Without a cohesive, driver-based planning model, financial forecasts often relied on manual calculations and individual judgment. This led to discrepancies across departments, making it harder for Altium to create precise and aligned plans that could support its growth trajectory. The leadership recognized the need for a more standardized approach to maintain the company’s efficiency as it scaled.
Solution
Farseer helped Altium take its financial processes to the next level with a centralized FP&A solution tailored to its needs. The first step was standardizing reporting formats across all regions, creating a unified financial language that enabled smoother consolidation. This allowed the leadership team to compare performance across entities effortlessly and provided the CFO, Ivan Jurković, with actionable insights into the company’s overall financial health.
To address the time constraints of manual processes, Farseer introduced an automated, driver-based planning model. By eliminating repetitive data entry tasks, the finance team could focus on higher-value strategic initiatives. This model also allowed Altium to set clear financial targets, like gross margins, and automatically calculate related metrics such as the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). The automation ensured consistency and precision in forecasting, giving the team confidence in their financial plans.
Real-time dashboards further enhanced Altium’s decision-making capabilities. These dashboards provided instant visibility into critical metrics such as total sales, gross profit, and EBITDA, allowing the team to monitor trends and performance across regions and product lines. By enabling quick and detailed analysis, Farseer empowered Altium to act on insights without delays, fostering a culture of agility and data-driven decision-making.
Results
The results of Altium’s partnership with Farseer showcase how thoughtful process improvements can drive meaningful change:
- 30% faster reporting: Standardized formats and automated consolidation significantly reduced the time required for reporting, allowing the finance team to deliver insights faster.
- 25% shorter planning cycles: The driver-based planning model enabled quicker adjustments and more aligned forecasts, ensuring that financial plans could adapt to strategic priorities.
- 75% user engagement on dashboards: Over 50 team members actively use Farseer’s dashboards, with 75% relying on them daily. This widespread adoption reflects the value of real-time data visibility in supporting decision-making.
Conclusion
Altium’s partnership with Farseer represents a natural evolution for a company already committed to excellence. By proactively adopting a centralized FP&A system, Altium streamlined its financial operations and set a strong foundation for sustained growth. The standardization of reporting, the introduction of an automated, driver-based planning model, and the real-time visibility provided by dashboards enabled Altium to refine its processes while staying agile in a competitive market.
Rather than transforming a struggling operation, Farseer complemented Altium’s strengths, empowering the finance team to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on strategic initiatives. This collaboration highlights how forward-thinking leadership and innovative tools can work together to maintain efficiency, scale operations, and deliver measurable improvements.
Today, Altium is better positioned than ever to navigate the complexities of the biotech and life sciences sector. Its enhanced financial framework provides the flexibility, accuracy, and insights needed to adapt to the demands of a dynamic industry. By building on its existing strengths, Altium not only addressed current challenges but also ensured its ability to seize future opportunities with confidence.
