How Vaillant uses think-cell to streamline financial reporting
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The Vaillant Group is the world market leader in central hydronic heating units. Hear from Ruben Latz, Manager Finance Project and Transition at the Vaillant Group, how the global company uses think-cell to boost the efficiency of their financial reporting processes.
- About Vaillant
- Financial reporting challenges at global enterprises
- How think-cell boosts productivity of daily reporting tasks
- Tracking initiatives with a think-cell dashboard
- How think-cell helps uncover insights in large datasets
- How think-cell improves the efficiency of financial reporting
- The future of the Vaillant Group and think-cell
About Vaillant
The Vaillant Group is an internationally active family-owned business based in Remscheid, Germany. The global market leader in central hydronic heating units celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2024. It offers its customers technologies for heating, cooling and hot-water supply that contribute to successfully shaping the energy transition in the buildings sector. The focus is on eco-friendly electric heat pumps, efficient gas-fired boilers, intelligent systems and comprehensive services.
The Vaillant Group employs 16,000 people worldwide, including more than 800 in research and development, serves around 30 million customers, and has more than 340,000 installation partners.
Ruben Latz, Manager Finance Project and Transition of Vaillant Group Business Services, started working at the Vaillant Group in 2017, which is also when he first encountered think-cell. He was quick to see the benefits and he’s never looked back since, with think-cell now an integral part of his financial reporting workflows.
"I’m not an IT expert by any means, and for me think-cell is very accessible. It doesn’t need much training to understand think-cell and its features.”
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Name |
Vaillant GmbH |
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Headquarters |
Remscheid, Germany |
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Employee count |
10,000+ |
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Industry |
Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology industry |
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Website |
Financial reporting challenges at global enterprises
For companies like the Vaillant Group that run complex, global operations, financial reporting needs to fulfil several criteria to be effective:
- Digestible: The large volumes of data in the Vaillant Group’s Business Warehouse need transforming into clear, high-level aggregations so that management can quickly consume the most important information.
- Insightful: Financial reporting is valuable when it goes beyond simply showing metrics to include additional commentary into causes, impacts and conclusions.
- Fast: Speed is a key element of creating value given the significant number and variety of financial reports enterprises like the Vaillant Group create.
- Flexible: Analysts can respond more efficiently to management requests when they can access, analyze and visualize data independently.
- Reliable: Financial reporting includes KPIs that drive critical business decisions, which makes data accuracy a non-negotiable for a company like the Vaillant Group.
In the following, we’ll look more closely at how Ruben Latz uses think-cell to ensure the Vaillant Group’s financial reporting ticks each of these boxes.
"I can use think-cell to respond to highly specific management requests by focusing on what matters for a particular planning cycle.”
How think-cell boosts productivity of daily reporting tasks
A big part of Ruben’s role at the Vaillant Group is building ad-hoc reports that look at financial data from different perspectives. This involves several steps: understanding the requirements, importing the data from the Vaillant Group’s Business Warehouse into Excel, building appropriate visualizations and providing commentary to explain his findings.
By using think-cell, Ruben can greatly speed up the visualization part of this process. He can choose the columns and rows he needs, and his charts will update accordingly. “For me, it’s important that I can transport the key message of a slide in a way that’s easily accessible to the audience. And with think-cell I can do this efficiently, quickly, and to a high standard,” he explains.
Ruben’s streamlined workflow lets him respond flexibly to requests. By using think-cell’s automations to reduce manual work, he frees up more time to add value to his presentations with expert analysis.
“My personal goal is to automate things as much as possible so I can focus more on the effects and spend less time on the visualization.”
Tracking initiatives with a think-cell dashboard
think-cell is also at the center of how Ruben tracks his initiatives. As well as using think-cell Gantt charts for project timelines, he has a PowerPoint dashboard linked to the Excel spreadsheet where he compiles his data. With all datapoints linked, he can monitor progress according to various different categorizations, and visualize the different views using the most appropriate think-cell charts.
The dashboard gives him a clear single-slide overview and helps him easily understand project status. “I can organize everything very clearly. And then it’s easy to refresh the dashboard and keep my standardized layout,” he demonstrates. Watch the video to see Ruben’s think-cell dashboard in action.
How think-cell helps uncover insights in large datasets
Like any global enterprise, the Vaillant Group’s financial operations are built on large amounts of data. Ruben’s work as an analyst sees him collating raw data and transforming it into a workable structure in Excel. From the spreadsheet, he then spins up think-cell column and waterfall charts to help inform the next stage of his analysis.
“Visualizing the data with think-cell is a great help during my analysis because it guides me to the right place in our ERP where I can find more information.”
Quickly consumable charts make it easy to identify areas of interest and cut the time spent on high-level overviews. This gives Ruben the opportunity to dig deeper and create more insightful financial reports that can help drive business decisions.
How think-cell improves the efficiency of financial reporting
While some reports require flexible, ad-hoc analysis, Ruben also works on regular monthly reports that track the Vaillant Group’s key financial metrics for their planning cycles. Reporting needs to be error-free, but it can be difficult to maintain consistency when compiling complex presentations with multiple charts, annotations and data-driven commentaries.
Ruben ensures consistency by using think-cell to keep manual adjustments to a minimum. He automates his reports by establishing links not just to chart data ranges, but to every single cell that contains a value he needs. In this way, think-cell’s Excel links help Ruben generate his reports faster, while also guaranteeing 100% accuracy.
"As soon as I‘ve validated the data in Excel, I can use think-cell to update everything on my slide at once. One bulk update and all my linked charts and individual values are refreshed."
Watch the video to see how Ruben Latz updates his monthly financial reports with think-cell.
The future of the Vaillant Group and think-cell
One reason think-cell has served the Vaillant Group so well over the years is the companies’ shared commitment to innovation. Discussing the think-cell Library, released in January 2025, Ruben can see the potential of its templates for his upcoming projects.
“Every project is unique with different topics and contexts that I want to present as clearly as possible. The think-cell Library gives me templates to choose from in order to create a good balance between text and visualization elements that will convey my message.”
For his future work with think-cell, Ruben also plans to work more closely with the think-cell tab, another feature available since January 2025. The standard think-cell tab makes all the most important features available in one place, but Ruben envisages further productivity boosts from adjusting it to his own workflows.
“I always like customizing things because it’s in my interest to complete my work as quickly and efficiently as possible, particularly when it comes to visualization.”
That’s the future, but even today think-cell is firmly embedded in Ruben’s work at the Vaillant Group, not just because he can benefit from time-saving automations, but because he can produce highly professional outputs that do justice to his data analysis.
“I set myself high standards when it comes to the consistency and quality of how my data is presented, and think-cell is an integral part of my daily work to fulfill this goal.”
Do you want to streamline your PowerPoint work with think-cell?
You can download a free, 30-day think-cell Suite trial, no credit card required, and see how think-cell can help you create dashboards and reports more efficiently.