Axiom Software by Syntellis Performance Solutions vs. Vena

Axiom is extremely well suited to optimize the Budget process. Using Axiom, we have cut our overall budget cycle time in half and have a much higher level of accuracy in all facets of the Budget including Fee Income, Expense, and Margin. Axiom is also well suited for advanced data users as you have the ability to create your own custom database tables which allows you to join to the existing Axiom tables and has allowed us to create custom reporting that we could not even think about on our previous system. The other big benefit of Axiom is that it sits on top of Microsoft Excel and inherits all of its functionality, which most people have experience with.

Incentivized

Whether you have processes you are looking to make more efficient or starting from scratch, Vena is a great tool to handle both. When we started with Vena all of reporting was either very manual or frankly nonexistent. Vena was pivotal in bringing us from zero to 10 in a short time. it helped us streamline the process of gathering data to the end reporting

Incentivized

• Compared to a previous EPM we used, Axiom's template load and saving performance has been much better even for large plan files.
• Axiom consultants can create completely customized reports for any of the collected data. Super users within your organization can then fairly easily modify their work to create additional reports without Axiom's help (and invoices)
• Setting up user security is a fairly easy one-time task and very easy to maintain when people change departments, leave the organization, etc. I would recommend you use role-based security settings.
• Compared to our previous EPM, Axiom allows more customization and possibilities for templates. There's very few "the product can't do that" statements.

Incentivized

• What i like best about Vena is that it is very seamless Excel integration.
• Vena fosters collabs across teams, helping multiple members to work together on financial planning in real-time enhancing overall efficiency.
• We now also can automate manual processes like budgeting, consolidation of data and reporting saves my valuable time and also reducing the risk of errors.

Incentivized

• Implementation is quite Complex and requires both IT and Financial buy-in
• Reporting solution has some learning curve for end users
• Calculation methods within reporting can be opaque and hard to trace

Incentivized

• It could improve the ease of implementation; it could take a long for an inexperienced IT team.
• From the ERP system perspective, it can be linked easily, but it has room for improvement when you make core changes and require a Vena specialist again.
• Some administrators can get confused while working on Excel implementation; it has complicated technical requirements.

Incentivized

Vena has been a huge win for us as an organization, as it vastly improved our budgeting process by removing manual consolidation that was incredibly time consuming, and it allows us to see a multi-year view of our organizational budget across all of our funding sources. We've seen Vena's platform grow over the years and we've not yet fully adopted some of them so it feels like there's still potential to get even more value out of the platform.

Incentivized

Vena allows any solution to be built the way you need it to work, and there are many different ways of going about what you need it to do. It may require time to build, test, and rebuild and retest, before the best solution to what you are trying to accomplish is reached. It is best for those who are Excel proficient because Vena utilizes and enhances the usage of existing Excel functions. For those who are not Excel proficient, the journey may be more challenging, however, with help of EMS, you can get your planning and reporting to a dynamic state.

Incentivized

Contact with Vena Solutions technical support is quick and experts in the field always respond. It is not necessary to go through a large form to explain the problems and then answer more questions to receive a direct answer, we simply send a message indicating the specific problem and they are immediately there to actively help us

Incentivized

Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages

Incentivized

For the scale of our implementation, Axiom only assigned two consultants who were both completely new to the company. It felt like we were all learning about the product together, when you would expect them to already be experts at their own product. The team also made a good bit of mistakes throughout production and go-live, which then caused more work internally for us. The team lead for our project also just left the company, so we'll see how next year's planning goes

Incentivized

They are very quick to respond when you submit a ticket and typically fix issues quickly as well. I only didn't give this a 10 because there is still an open issue with our Salesforce connection that we've been waiting on now for a few months.

Incentivized

Our initial in person training was a little rough b/c I felt like our trainer wanted to focus on maximizing Vena rather than understanding what we were needing for our organization. He was very responsive and added insights, but could have worked to understand our needs a little better.

Incentivized

The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.

Incentivized

The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates

Axiom was selected based on the impression of ease of use and integration. It is capable of holding all of our entities data while giving us an easier more accessible way to deliver monthly Financials and reports to managers. Then in costing we signed up because the impression of budgeting.

Incentivized

Vena Solutions stands out due to its familiar Excel-based interface, making it easy for our team to adopt without extensive training. Compared to alternatives like Anaplan and Oracle Hyperion, Vena's strong customer support and efficient automation have significantly reduced our budgeting cycle time. We chose Vena for its seamless integration with our existing systems and substantial time-saving benefits, ultimately enhancing our decision-making process.

Incentivized

We onboarded the entire company in a very short time frame to complete the full company budget cycle the first year out of the gate. Now we are looking to add more data and the ETL tool makes it easy to backload data into the cube as if was always there. Vena has been very scalable for our needs.

Incentivized

• Forecasting has improved
• Complexity of analysis has improved as well
• Our main data has been confused as we started using Axiom

• Eliminated the necessity to manually combine multiple Excel budget worksheets into one file in order to compile an org-wide budget
• Allows end-users to be self-sufficient by having the ability to drill into transaction-level detail and conduct ad-hoc analyses
• Created more bandwidth in the FP&A team to spend more time on more meaningful analysis

Incentivized