Insights from the 21st Adriatik Controlling Conference
How do you manage a portfolio of 229 active projects across seven countries, spanning two distinct business models, with some contracts running for 25 years? That was the opening question posed by Aleš Jurak, Chief Operating Officer at Resalta, during his presentation at this year’s Adriatik Controlling Conference in Ljubljana.
The answer lies in data architecture.
From Excel to a Data Warehouse
Resalta was founded in 2011 as a joint venture between Gorenje, Geoplin, and Energetika Ljubljana. Today, it is part of the Scottish group Aggreko and operates as one of the region’s leading energy services providers, with activities spanning solar power plants and energy storage, comprehensive building energy retrofits, heating and cooling systems, and decarbonization services.
In 2019, Resalta introduced a standardized 150-step project management process, initially tracked in Excel. As the portfolio grew and geographic reach expanded, it became clear that the process needed to be digitalized.
The approach was incremental: first, master data management was established on the Webcon platform; then a data warehouse was built to consolidate data from multiple business process management systems across different countries. CRMT built the data foundation, with visualization and analytics delivered via the Strategy platform.
Four Controlling Challenges That Don’t Forgive Poor Architecture
Jurak identified four fundamental challenges that, in long-term investment portfolios, simply cannot be managed without the right data architecture:
Consolidating data from multiple systems.
Data from different business systems, countries, and time periods must be unified into a single reliable source. Without that, portfolio management is effectively guesswork.
Early detection of variances.
Cost and schedule deviations need to be visible immediately, not once invoices have already been posted. As Jurak put it: “An invoice that’s been booked is already history. By then, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Plan-vs-actual comparison in real time.
Monthly closings are too slow. Different accounting systems across countries make consolidation even harder.
Dynamic tracking of internal rate of return (IRR).
A project’s IRR cannot be monitored only at contract signing. With 25-year energy performance contracts, any deviation in the early years creates a gap that requires explanation every year thereafter.
Five Dashboards
The solution Resalta operates today consists of five interconnected operational dashboards:
- Portfolio overview
Displays the geographic distribution of projects, total investment volume, and live portfolio status for all 229 projects across seven countries, updated daily.
- Project performance
Enables monthly revenue-vs-plan comparison at the individual project level, including running totals and a purchase order overview.
- Sales-to-handover
Tracks the process from contract signing through to client handover, surfacing bottlenecks before they translate into financial losses. This is critical for projects that frequently move between sales, development, and execution phases.
- Direct cost control
Compares planned and actual procurement costs across the portfolio. The target is a 3% procurement saving relative to total project value — measured at the portfolio level, not deal by deal.
- IRR tracker
Dynamically compares actual returns against the baseline figures approved by the investment committee across the full project lifetime. For Resalta, that means tracking through to 2037.
One Logic, One System
What sets Resalta’s approach apart is a unified data foundation that serves all business models, turnkey projects, and long-term energy performance contracts. Although these models differ in duration, risk allocation, and revenue dynamics, they share the same execution phases. A single controlling system is therefore not only feasible, but the logical choice.
“Our ambition was for this to happen significantly faster,” Jurak acknowledged. Interim acquisitions, integrations, and corporate reporting requirements slowed the build. Even so, the message is clear: high-quality operational controlling for complex, geographically dispersed portfolios is not primarily a question of tools. It is a question of data architecture and the discipline to maintain it.
If you recognize these challenges in your own organization and would like to explore how a similar transformation could work in your environment, get in touch. Our team would be happy to walk you through the options and help you identify where to start.
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