99% reduction in time to integrate data with BigQuery
200 business units run simultaneous queries with no impact on performance
Time to insights down from days to seconds with unified data platform on Google Cloud
Cuts customer support ticket analysis from two days to minutes with Gemini and BigQuery
With BigQuery and Google Cloud, Visma and Tripletex have fast, powerful data insights, accelerating Visma’s financial reporting, and helping Tripletex refine its products for an enhanced customer experience.
With BigQuery and Google Cloud, Visma and Tripletex have fast, powerful data insights, accelerating Visma’s financial reporting, and helping Tripletex refine its products for an enhanced customer experience.
Speeding up financial reporting with a scalable cloud platform
As one of Europe’s leading software companies, with operations across Europe and Latin America, Visma empowers 2 million business customers globally to work smarter. Composed of more than 200 companies, Visma provides central support and resources to these individual business units, leaving them free to focus on their field of expertise.
A key component of this centralized support is Visma’s central data platform, built on BigQuery. This combines data from more than 100 sources giving Visma business units invaluable data insights to inform their strategic decision-making on everything from product development to marketing and sales.
In addition to the central data platform, Visma has a separate, central financial data warehouse, which Visma’s business units use to streamline their financial reporting. While Visma’s central data platform was born on Google Cloud, its financial data warehouse previously used a relational database running on a third-party platform. Access to this financial data warehouse depended on shared user credentials, which posed a security risk, and for business units doing their reporting using Google Sheets, data integration was slow.
During busy periods such as month-end closing, the system struggled to handle the hundreds of users from across Visma’s business units trying to access the same data tables at the same time. This often led to deadlock. “Deadlock is a common feature of relational databases,” explains Paul Hetes, Data Delivery Manager at Visma. “For the finance teams, deadlock would effectively block them from performing their month-end closing.”
To resolve these issues, Visma decided to migrate its financial data platform to a new cloud platform. BigQuery’s first-party integration with Google Sheets made it an obvious choice, allowing Visma’s business units to streamline their data integrations. Crucially, the fact that BigQuery is designed for parallel processing at scale meant it could meet Visma’s performance needs without deadlocks.
Cutting data integration time by 99 percent with BigQuery
Visma migrated its financial data warehouse to BigQuery in 2022. Now, Visma’s 200 business units can access the same data tables simultaneously to complete their month-end closing without issue. Data integrations are also much faster, down from 24 hours for certain integrations to just 15 minutes, all at a significantly lower price.
“With BigQuery, the whole month-end closing process has been reduced from days to just two hours,” says Camilla Mortensen, Head of Data and Analytics at Visma. “That’s a big improvement for our finance teams across our 200 business units, who can use that time to build value for their businesses.”
Access to the platform is now restricted by user groups, making Visma’s data far more secure. The combined result of these changes is that Visma business units can self-serve information without relying on the central data team. This is reflected in the sharp rise in the number of custom data sets users are creating since migrating to Google Cloud.
“With our previous platform, we had about 10 custom data sets,” recalls Hetes.
With BigQuery, the whole month-end closing process has been reduced from days to just two hours. That’s a big improvement for our finance teams across our 200 business units, who can use that time to build value for their businesses.
Camilla Mortensen
Head of Data and Analytics, Visma
“Now with Google Cloud we have 160, enabling each unit to explore and drill down into their own data and build models. Everything each unit needs for their financial reporting is covered.”
Giving business units a 360-degree view of operations with Looker Studio
Having both its central data platform and financial data warehouse in Google Cloud makes it easy for Visma business users to merge data to find insights. “Users can join data between the two environments very easily,” explains Hetes. “Previously the central data team would have needed to create custom scripts to unify all this data in one place. Now users have the freedom to dice and slice their data sets and gain insights.”
With Looker Studio, users across Visma’s business units can explore that data with no need for technical expertise. This in turn has significantly reduced the number of technical requests the central data team receives, allowing it to focus instead on higher-value initiatives.
“We’ve seen a huge natural adoption of Looker Studio by our business units over the last year because it's so easy to connect and use,” explains Mortensen. “It helps to empower our business units with a 360-degree view of their operations to make data-driven decisions to steer their business.”
We’ve seen a huge natural adoption of Looker Studio by our business units over the last year because it's so easy to connect and use. It helps to empower our business units with a 360-degree view of their operations to make data-driven decisions to steer their business.
Camilla Mortensen
Head of Data and Analytics, Visma
Helping Tripletex improve the customer experience with data insights in seconds
While all Visma companies can access these central data platforms, they operate independently, and can build their own data infrastructure as required. For Norway’s largest accounting software company, Tripletex, which was acquired by Visma in 2016, BigQuery was the platform of choice to answer the challenges they were facing with their previous data solution.
Previously, time-to-insight was measured in days. With BigQuery, it’s measured in seconds. Our product managers now spend far less time figuring out our customers’ problems, and more time building better solutions.
Emil Mårtensson
Data Analyst, Tripletex
“We were reaching the limits of our transactional database and integrations were becoming difficult. Lacking a single source of truth meant we had divergences in reality, with different teams having different insights,” recalls Emil Mårtensson, Data Analyst at Tripletex. “We tested BigQuery and it blew the competition out of the water. The syntax library and compute power made complex analytical queries way easier than in competitive systems. We also benefited from BigQuery's wide integration support.”
Now Tripletex can blend all its data in a single source of truth to generate insights that were previously inaccessible. When it comes to product development, for example, Tripletex can use BigQuery to analyze customer journeys to understand how its software can be improved.
With BigQuery’s scalable architecture, Tripletex gets those insights quickly, speeding up its development process.
“Previously, time-to-insight was measured in days. With BigQuery, it’s measured in seconds,” says Mårtensson. “Our product managers now spend far less time figuring out our customers’ problems, and more time building better solutions.”
Fully automating customer support ticket analysis with Gemini
Tripletex is now using Vertex AI and Gemini to give its product teams even clearer insights, while improving the efficiency of its customer support team. Every time a customer support agent completes an inquiry, they log it, summarizing the conversation and how it was resolved. Previously, this was done manually, using up valuable resources. Then, when the product team wanted to understand what issues customers were facing, they needed to read through lengthy transcripts. With 140,000 customers asking 50,000 support queries a month, there were far more transcripts than the product team could read.
To handle this volume of support-ticket summarization, Tripletex automated the entire process with Google Cloud. It built custom pipelines to ingest customer support data into BigQuery, then with the help of Gemini, Cloud Run and Cloud Run functions, it automated the process of support ticket summarization and categorization. The summaries are sent back to BigQuery where they can be analyzed. No longer having to tag these tickets manually has saved the customer support team more than eight hours a day.
The Tripletex team then used Gemini to build a chatbot to enable its product teams to query all the support-ticket data in BigQuery to understand the issues customers are facing, saving them hours a week reading transcripts.
Understanding what customers are struggling with is a huge part of the product team’s job. Being able to do that in minutes with Gemini and BigQuery, instead of two days manually, is huge.
Martin Bø
Data Analyst, Tripletex
With insights into how customers are using their products, the Tripletex product team can now prioritize its workload and get on with refining its products to improve the customer experience.
“Understanding what customers are struggling with is a huge part of the product team’s job,” explains Martin Bø, Data Analyst at Tripletex. “Being able to do that in minutes with Gemini and BigQuery, instead of two days manually, is huge.”
As Visma grows, welcoming new companies almost weekly, it’s now structuring its data to allow for further uses of AI across the company to increase efficiency and support its growth. Underpinning this vision is BigQuery, giving its business units the support and insights they need to drive their own success—and that of the wider Visma network—long into the future.
Visma is a leading provider of business-critical cloud software. A collective of entrepreneurial tech companies, it empowers nearly two million businesses across Europe and Latin America to streamline their operations and drive efficiency.
Tripletex is a Visma company and Norway's premier cloud-based enterprise resource planning system for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Industry: Technology
Location: Norway
Products: BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Run functions, Gemini, Google Sheets, Looker Studio, Vertex AI
