A never-ending process
Margareta Henrich-Quist is an avid runner. “I run to refresh my mind. If I need to make a presentation or when I need to think things through, I put on my running shoes and go just for a 5K – then I can put everything together in my head, come back, take a shower and complete my slide deck.”
This comes in handy for her as Director, Global Financial Systems & Digitalization at Royal Vopak (typically referred to as Vopak), where she’s one of the executives helping guide the company’s strategy. Vopak, headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands, provides storage and handling services for bulk liquid products and the transition to (new) energies. If you’ve seen immense storage tanks in ports or fields, you’ve seen one of the many infrastructure solutions offered by Vopak, operates large-scale storage tank infrastructure. Their services go beyond just storage to include ensuring safety, the security of the supply chain and providing new services focused on sustainability and the transition to new energy sources.
Margareta’s energy and enthusiasm are likewise transformative. She has spent her career exploring different ways of working, motivated by her natural curiosity and quest to solve problems in new ways. “To me, innovation is a never-ending process of making things better – you can embed it everywhere. If you look beyond what you currently do, if you’re brave enough to try different approaches, you can make a positive impact – not only in systems and work, but in life.”
Getting other people to embrace new approaches draws on another facet of Margareta’s enthusiastic leadership: she likes being a guide, empowering colleagues through down-to-earth communication, collaborative planning, and training. “Explanation and just sitting together are so important. If you don’t make sure that training and guidance are part of your plan, it will never be accepted.”
She embraces this mindset with her team, encouraging open discussion and mentorship. “If you always have the conversation with your team and make sure they feel comfortable to learn new things, they will grow – and then I will grow as well.” Not surprisingly, her team has very low turnover and people are eager to join.
From farm to finance
Margareta didn’t set out to work in finance and analytics. She grew up on a small farm with her parents, where technology was limited and life moved to the rhythms of rural routines. Her first real encounter with data and technology was at the University of Rotterdam, where she studied Management Economics and Law, with a specialization in banking and insurance. It was also where she first saw there were lots of inefficiencies in manual processes, kicking off a lasting passion.
“When I graduated, I still didn’t know what I would like to do, because you have so many options,” she recalls. After a brief stint in accounting, a connection through a friend’s father led her to Vopak—an introduction that would define her career.
Margareta’s first days at Vopak were heady and her future there was by no means a sure thing: she was the only woman in a team of older colleagues, entering an environment where skepticism about women in a combination of Finance & IT still lingered. But she thrived, using humor and camaraderie to break down barriers. As the newest member of the team, she was asked to join the financial systems group to help translate financial requirements into technology solutions—a rare skill. She succeeded and became the system administrator for Hyperion Enterprise, which in those days involved traveling around the world with CDs to do installations. Her first big step in her lifelong pursuit of efficiency and automation was to install Citrix for consolidation purposes, enabling remote installations and effectively uniting many environments into one. “Making errors when you put it on paper, that was gone. We could rely more on the data because we had all the controls built in the system,” she explains.
Never underestimate the change
It’s Margareta’s credo for any project: “that’s the first sentence I always say.”
They’ve been good words to live by as she’s helped guide the company’s digital finance transformation. By 2017, Vopak already had a vision of being data driven. A key pillar of that vision was to consolidate different ERP solutions, so data could be shared to make it easier for teams to collaborate across the company. Oracle Cloud enabled Vopak to consolidate 13 different on-premises JD Edwards systems into one environment.
As with any project of that magnitude, there were some challenges. “If you look at how Oracle is designed, you really need to work from your subledgers. But at that time, Vopak was only looking at the General Ledger.” It was a perfect opportunity to look beyond the way things were done to find a new way to work, with Vopak adjusting to review subledgers. “Change can be frustrating,” Margareta acknowledged. “I was Miss Oracle, and within Vopak that means it was up to me and the support teams to change frustration into opportunities. Because we could consolidate the environments, decision-making on change management was becoming faster. That really changed how people looked at Oracle moving forward.”
Another positive outcome of moving to Oracle Cloud was new analytics, using Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI). FDI is a family of prebuilt analytic applications for Oracle Cloud Applications that delivers best practice key metrics and domain expertise to help decision-makers run their business. “Working with FDI, we configured so many dashboards that give insights. We combine data sources for really detailed information, and we can drill down from FDI to the invoice level, which is really changing the way we work. It’s unlocked the door for efficiency. Now we spend time on analysis instead of waiting for reports to generate. Using data is much more fun when we combine it the correct way in FDI.”
The results are impressive: massive reports that used to time out now return in under a minute – but in a way, the culture change is even more striking. Vopak’s procurement team has monthly global performance meetings which now run from FDI dashboards, with the director of procurement and his teams talking through the different process indicators to align on improvements and next steps. In that area, Excel isn’t used anymore – in fact, it’s not allowed. Margareta says the same approach will phase into finance over time.
Work and life
When we talked about what’s important to her, Margareta said, “I’m passionate about using data and AI to make smart decisions,” then went on to add, “but they should also be used the correct way, so it’s ethical. I really believe that if we use data in a careful way, taking privacy and security into account, it can change industries and also help individuals.”
Outside work, Margareta’s focus is family—her husband and two teenagers. At home, as at work, she has a set of core values: a shared commitment to learning and growing together, openness, respect. To that end, she gets to work early so she can maximize time for family dinners, which she cherishes. She also finds peace in household tasks, observing them through her trademark lens of humor and efficiency. “How can you combine things in a better way for your housekeeping? Maybe an app on your laundry machine – that’s also innovation, if you ask me.”
When asked what advice she would give her younger self, she replied without hesitating: “Stay strong, keep your head up. 24 years ago, it was not common that women became part of a combination Finance & IT organization. You will succeed if you really keep close to yourself, and believe in yourself.”
Follow these links for more information about Vopak and FDI, and you can always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.