FSN Capital Partners is a leading Northern European Mid-Market Private Equity firm, with approximately €4 billion in assets under management.
The firm engaged Holland Mountain to assess its iLEVEL portfolio monitoring system and establish the improvements that could be made to templates, reports, dashboards, data & surrounding business processes to increase efficiency and maximise the benefits of the system.
Through the subsequent iLEVEL optimisation project, we brought transformative changes to FSN’s portfolio monitoring function.
The 6 key iLEVEL enhancements we implemented for FSN are:
1. Standardized Data Collection Templates
We worked with the business to design a single, standardized data collection template. This template has as many common metrics as possible, while still allowing for the collection of asset-specific metrics in a dynamic and efficient way. By implementing this significant change, we’ve made it easier, both for portfolio companies to submit the data, and for FSN to analyse and report on it. This change has also made it significantly easier for the business to update the datapoints being collected.
2. Streamlined Data Item Framework
We reviewed and consolidated the data item framework, cutting it down in cases where the same metric was named differently (e.g. ‘revenue’ and ‘sales’). As a result, the business can access the data they need, directly from iLEVEL, without having to ask for it and reports can be generated in a fraction of the time they took previously.
3. Implemented Data Governance
We implemented tools to promote data governance, such as cell validation rules to prevent incorrect data formats, and conditional formatting to highlight changes to historic data. By making it easier to identify errors or gaps in the data, we have increased the accuracy of the data being submitted, and reduced the time that FSN spends reviewing it.
4. Setup loading of cash transactions
The business hadn’t historically loaded cash transactions into iLEVEL, which had limited its potential benefits. We worked with FSN to develop a simple framework for cash transactions to enable calculation of performance measures such as gross and net IRRs, directly in the system. We built a cash transactions loader file and setup reports to enable the team to easily review and validate the data in iLEVEL. We created a proof of concept for a selected fund to demonstrate that the aggregation and calculations were working as required. Now, the investment and IR/fundraising teams can easily view fund performance calculations in iLEVEL.
5. Dashboard & reporting best practice
In addition to the above improvements, which had a huge downstream impact on the ease of reporting, we also rolled out a further suite of reports & dashboards, both to support the periodic portfolio monitoring processes and meetings, and to support the governance of data in the system.
6. System Training
Once the changes had been implemented, we onboarded each portfolio company onto the new data collection template. We lead training sessions for each FSN team of iLEVEL users, showing them everything they can get from the system. We taught them about functionality they weren’t previously aware of, like how to bulk upload data, and how they can now use iLEVEL to calculate performance metrics.
“Working with Kelvin and the Holland Mountain team has been great. They have excellent knowledge of iLEVEL best practice. With Holland Mountain’s help, we now use the system in ways we didn’t know were possible before. We’ve reduced the time it takes to collect data and produce our monthly and quarterly reports from weeks to a matter of hours.”
Felix Schroeder, Valuation & Controlling Manager at FSN Capital Partners
To see how Holland Mountain’s team of portfolio monitoring experts can help you get more from your system, get in touch today for a System Assessment.
About Holland Mountain
Holland Mountain is a leading specialist Consulting firm for the Private Capital industry, and the 2022 and 2023 winners of Best Advisory/Consultancy for Operations & Technology in The Drawdown’s Private Equity Service Provider Awards. Our globally-recognized team of Private Capital operations, technology and data experts has delivered 350+ successful operational strategy and change management projects for over 150 Private Equity, Private Debt, Real Estate and Infrastructure managers globally. We leverage our unrivalled Private Capital operations expertise to support our clients to establish the people, processes, technology and data capabilities they need to achieve their strategic objectives.