This article was originally published on OneStream.com
John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc. Overview
John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc. (NASDAQ: JBSS) is a processor, packager, marketer and distributor of nut and dried fruit-based products that are sold under a variety of private brands and under the Company’s Fisher®, Orchard Valley Harvest®, Squirrel Brand®, Southern Style Nuts® and Sunshine Country® brand names. For more information, please visit JBSSInc.com.
“We’re no longer responsible for centrally managing templates and pushing them out to the users for updates. The automation of the calculations has freed up my team quite a bit. It used to take us weeks to collect all the data in Excel® and load it into BPC. Now the users just enter their forecasts right into OneStream. As a result, our forecasting cycle reduced from two weeks to two days.”
— Todd Marcukaitis, Sr. Director, Financial Planning and Sales Operations, JBSS
The Challenge
Founded in 1922, John B. Sanfilippo & Son, Inc. (JBSS) is a major processor and distributor of snack and recipe nut products. With four plants including their headquarters in Illinois, peanut sheller in Georgia, pecan sheller in Texas and walnut sheller in California, JBSS operates with around 1,200 employees and generates over $900M in revenue.
JBSS was using SAP BPC for more than 14 years as their internal sales reporting system, financial reporting system and forecasting tool. While BPC initially met the needs of the company, there was a lot of manual manipulation required on their end. It was difficult to make tops-down adjustments that flowed through the system. Additionally, the version of BPC being used was reaching its end of life, and converting to the SAP Cloud would be a major undertaking plus a substantial cost.
“We were jumping through hoops a bit,” said Todd Marcukaitis, Sr. Director, Financial Planning and Sales Operations at JBSS. “For reporting, we look to get information at the base level and across multiple hierarchies where that data expands. SAP BPC is based on a cube format that couldn’t handle our reporting needs.” For JBSS it was the right time to search the market for a new solution.
The Evaluation Process
JBSS looked at multiple vendors including, Anaplan, Adaptive Insights, Vena, Prophix and Jedox before eventually narrowing it down to the final three: Anaplan, Adaptive Insights and OneStream. “The biggest selling point was when OneStream sent us their customer list,” said Marcukaitis. “They encouraged us to call whoever and discuss whatever — and we heard a lot of good things.” JBSS had trouble getting a response from SAP in the past, meanwhile comments about OneStream Support were positive. JBSS also received strong feedback about how OneStream would handle all the upgrades without burdening the IT team.
“It was also important for the users to see value in our new solution because we are a cross-functional team,” said Marcukaitis. “We do a sales forecast but also convert that to a financial forecast, and OneStream keeps that streamlined under one roof. Our finance team and demand planning team really liked the OneStream interface, and its powerful compatibility on both the sales and finance sides. In the end, we chose OneStream because it was the most impressive solution.”
Implementing an Intelligent Finance Platform
“We wanted to replace what we had and make some slight improvements because our process was so complex,” said Marcukaitis. “Our large project was to replace our sales cube and finance cubes out of SAP BPC.” On the finance side, this included moving GL reporting, forecast and financial planning, balance sheet comparisons, income statement comparisons and more into OneStream.
JBSS worked with both OneStream Consulting Services and OneStream implementation partner, Black Diamond Advisory, on the platform implementation. The financial side was up and running in about three months, while the sales implementation was completed in six months’ time. JBSS also took advantage of OneStream’s Analytic Blend technology to handle larger data sets in the sales cube.
“We deployed in the cloud — so far it’s been really good with the security we’ve seen,” Marcukaitis added. “We’ve done two upgrades, and everything went smoothly as promised. We’re experiencing high availability, performance and stability.”
JBSS is now completing the annual budget and periodic forecasting in OneStream. These quarterly re-forecasts enable JBSS to get the latest costs, volumes and expenses that help reforecast the annual budget. “OneStream provides the executive team visibility to change or shift data as needed,” said Marcukaitis. “We’ve experienced some supply chain issues with COVID-19, so it is really important to stay on top of these higher costs and do what’s necessary to take on these changes.”
Benefits Realized
According to Marcukaitis, one of the main benefits of the project has been shifting a lot of the work to the actual users. “We’re no longer responsible for centrally managing templates and pushing them out to the users for updates. The automation of the calculations has freed up my team quite a bit.” JBSS has also shortened the forecasting process.
“It used to take us weeks to collect all the data in Excel® and load it into BPC. Now the users just enter their forecasts right into OneStream. As a result, our forecasting cycle reduced from two weeks to two days.”
Additional improvements include the ability to do more allocations at the customer level with the forecast. The Sales team can forecast quantities like the number of pounds shipped, price per pound, etc., with all revenues and costs driven off those quantities. JBSS can then calculate trade spend based off those rates. “We used to do this manually each quarter to calculate and load the data back into SAP BPC,” said Marcukaitis. “Now we’ve loaded the rates, and everything is calculated automatically for us in OneStream. It’s very powerful and flexible.”
From a reporting standpoint, the financial planning team has gone from maintaining 30 Excel® templates to one master template in OneStream. With over 50 users from many different functions using OneStream, they now have the power to download templates themselves, make changes and upload them back into the system. “Change is hard, but we haven’t had much resistance, which is a testament to OneStream,” said Marcukaitis. “Plant managers are putting in their costs, and that’s not something we could do in BPC. Having an audit trail is new as well, so we can check when numbers change, who made that change and why.”
Extending the OneStream Platform
JBSS has plans to expand their use of the platform. Possible add-on solutions include Demand Planning, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. The company is also interested in Transaction Matching, Account Reconciliations and the Parcel Service solutions from the OneStream MarketPlaceTM. “That was another selling point of the product — to have the MarketPlace available,” said Marcukaitis. “Also, there is the training on the OneStream Academy and many support videos. We hope to do a deeper dive into these areas and expand our use case next year.”
About the Implementation Partner
Black Diamond is the leading Global Digital Finance Transformation firm and OneStream Diamond Partner. Our services include Financial Transformation, Change Management, Process Automation and OneStream Solutions. We are a global partner operating in the U.S., Canada and Europe. As a single firm with truly global capability, Black Diamond is committed to meeting the combined needs of the CFO and Controller, as well as IT and Business Unit Leaders. The firm knows that the solution to a company’s digital finance transformation is expert implementation and ongoing collaboration.
We lead with our talent of “Experts Only” and develop a unique platform for each of our clients combining finance and operational data into interactive dashboards and real-time analytics. Our firm has a single mission of 100% Customer Success that is directly aligned with the OneStream executive leadership. For more information, visit BlackDiamondAdvisory.com.
