Managing Director and Founder – Drivatic
Historically I have been in the finance world and reporting was always a big part of what I did. I had developed my Excel & VBA abilities up to an advanced level and could automate a lot of my work.
But those skills were rare in the organisations I spent time in and all I saw was just immense inefficiencies around how data was gathered, curated, explored and consumed.
It was seriously frustrating how much time I witnessed spent on just reporting historical information.
The grind of working in Excel, then transferring this into PowerPoint to then only produce a static document that most people internally just glanced over just wasn’t right. I was then doing it all again next week, month or quarter.
Somehow this has just been accepted as the norm everywhere.
When we started to develop DRIVATIC I saw immediately what was possible.
After spending a lot of time in the data analysis trenches historically to see that I could automate nearly all the manual work I would have had to do previously…and then be able to produce amazing insights fast in a compelling way, I knew that DRIVATIC were on to something….something huge.
The scale I was able to achieve around the reporting and insights generation was seriously worlds apart from what had been done in the past.
I’m sure that this is a global problem.
Most use the same Microsoft toolset and most companies have the same issues. Through DRIVATIC though I believe we have a solution that improves this situation significantly.
So that’s why I started DRIVATIC. I wanted to empower others to achieve the same results I did and imagine the opportunities in their own environments.
ROBERT COWLEY
CFO of Namakwa Diamonds – July 2018
As the person shareholders look at the provide answers in terms of information and performance, I equipped myself over the past 20 years in the Mining industry with a toolset to have relevant information ready in time. Faced with shareholders in a private company who are resourced with skilled analytics, deep knowledge of the operations and an endless need for more information I was forced to revisit my trusted tools and find something new.
In DRIVATIC I found the one tool, which I have never experienced in my career that provides you with state-of-the-art visual presentation and the ability to analyze each detailed part of this picture right here, now with the click of a button! My function and my world were turned around… No more waiting for information for hours, weeks or even longer.
Immediately the much-needed cross-functional understanding was enabled. All stakeholders can now focus on facts, rather than speculation. Two of the most important issues facing businesses today are resolved, fact-based information and the time people have available to address what these facts indicate.
MITFORD MUNDELL
CEO of Namakwa Diamonds – July 2018
For more than thirty years I experienced the painstaking management time that had to be spent on assembling and correcting management information in Excel, followed by more painstaking attempts to make the numbers look good in multi-slide PowerPoint presentations. Mostly, after all the effort to develop these reports, there remained gaps between what was presented and what was required by the receiver and presenter, both in terms of relevance and accuracy. To make things worse, so much wasted time was spent in opinion-based meetings, resulting in gut-feel decisions, influenced by the loudest voices or biggest egos, which all translated in hit-&-miss, trial-&-error actions. So much time and effort, that could and should have been spent on more value-adding work. Decisions based on relevant, up to date information often seemed like an unattainable dream.
What a change it was, sometime during 2017, when Robert (our CFO) started working with Juan (the creator of DRIVATIC). Having seen many fads and promises of silver bullets in my career, I must admit that I was a bit sceptical at first. It didn’t take long for me to realize that DRIVATIC was the solution I’ve been searching for throughout my career!
We now have all our business numbers in one platform, organised in a way that presents clear and interactive views of all the relevant information, prioritised around our biggest business drivers. I cannot imagine anymore to go back to the days of relying solely on Excel and PowerPoint. Every meeting, whether it is a functional review, business planning session, or projects steer-com, revolves around the facts and interactive graphical representations that was brought to life by DRIVATIC.
Our fact-based and value-driver driven decisions and actions of the past year have already resulted in huge improvements, resulting in our best bottom-line year ever. I can now only imagine, with the facts in hand and illuminated, what we can still do in future. I will never again do it without the help of DRIVATIC.