Community Voices: Etienne Causse

Miran Saric

The Community Voices series continues this month with a Board Community champion and customer—Etienne Causse. Etienne joins us from Groupe SEB and shares with us highlights of his Board journey and successes, as well his favorite parts of interacting here in Community. You’ll find Etienne interacting throughout Community, so feel free to say hello any time.

We’re excited to keep the momentum going with Community Voices! In case you missed them, check out our other featured members—Krisztina Zappert and Nicolas Chigros.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background with Board.

I’m currently Head of Technology for the Finance Transformation department of Groupe SEB, a world leading producer of small domestic equipment. I was part of the team organizing the RFP for an EPM platform in 2016 as a project lead, and I became responsible for all our reporting & EPM tools in 2018.

Since 2016, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Board platform—first to learn it and develop applications and prototypes, then to lead projects and train my colleagues on the tool and on our data models.

What has been a high point in your Board experience? How has Board enabled you to achieve success in your role?

We had a very good example of Board capabilities in 2018 when we started the integration of a new subsidiary in the group. They were unable to follow our detailed forecast requirements with their previous processes. Together with a financial controller of the subsidiary, I built a forecasting tool in less than a week by duplicating our reporting data model and activating data entry features with split & splat function, which allowed them to quickly build detailed forecast data based on top-level assumption.

This was a very good demonstration of what we could achieve with the right tool, the right skills, and an agile organization.

More generally, the agility we acquired thanks to Board and the building of modeling skills within the Finance function has allowed us to be recognized internally by providing quick and efficient solutions to emerging problems, especially for Controlling functions. It has also helped us to accelerate our major projects by developing a major part of the applications ourselves, limiting the need for external consultants.

What advice do you have for new and/or experienced Board users in their Intelligent Planning journey?

My first advice for newcomers is to spend time to understand the way the platform works and then to build the data model for their application, because having the right way to model your fundamentals will save a lot of time later in the building and use of your application. Make sure you identify all the dimensions in your process and get down to the fundamental concepts to make sure all possible relationships are integrated in the model.

Then, use your intuition to merge similar concepts into the same entities and trees when it’s possible. It can save a lot of complexity, improve performance, and improve maintenance (for example, to simplify access rights management).

As one of our most active Board Community members, what part(s) of the Community experience would you recommend to others?

Since the beginning of the Board Community, there has always been a strong core of contributors who could provide experienced feedback on various issues, so don’t hesitate to ask. In the last years, the level of documentation improved—especially in Best Practices which are very important to make the most out of the tool, so I strongly recommend taking time to read them.

Finally, it’s important to feed the Idea Exchange section with what you need next. Sometimes your idea is implemented as you wish, sometimes your need is considered in a different way, sometimes the solution is already there. But it’s always valuable to the Community.

Find all Community Voices here.


Thank you, Etienne, for sharing your journey with the Board Community! Let your voice be heard by ‘liking’ this post, adding a comment, or reaching out to the Community Team directly at community@board.com. We’d be thrilled to share your story in a future post!