This article first appeared on OneStreamSoftware.com
Toll Group
Toll Group, part of Japan Post, is a logistics, distribution and freight forwarding business with dual headquarters in Melbourne and Singapore. Toll Group has approximately 20,000 team members helping solve any logistics, transport, or global supply chain challenge — big or small — supporting more than 20,000 customers worldwide and operating across 1,200 sites in 50 countries, with an Asia Pacific focus and a forwarding network spanning 150 countries. For more information, please visit TollGroup.com.
” OneStream allows us to seamlessly roll-up our business units financial data to the group level. The unified platform and the budgeting and forecasting enhancements OneStream facilitated mean that each subsidiary can model their budget at the level of detail required for their subsidiary and make the results immediately available to Group Finance.”
– Peter Smith, Group Finance Manager, Toll Group
The Challenge
Toll Group’s previous Oracle Hyperion and EPM Cloud landscape for financial close and consolidation, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting was complex, fragmented, and costly to maintain and support. In addition, Oracle support for their existing version of Hyperion was ending, requiring Toll Group to assess their options for the way forward. Toll Group needed a significantly better integrated, simplified and streamlined approach across all their business units.
Toll’s objective was to have the statutory consolidation and reporting process for all legal entities handled by a single group team in a single system. This would improve the Group governance and oversight on compliance activities and results analysis, while also enabling divisional team resources to focus on internal budgeting and forecasting, performance reporting and local ledger reporting development.
The Evaluation Process
Toll Group needed a low-risk approach and undertook a market scan to investigate alternatives. Key business requirements driving their evaluation included the desire to have one common consolidation and reporting platform across Toll Group to address the complexity. Toll also wanted to move to the Cloud to improve IT security and reduce IT support and network costs, while providing the ability to satisfy Japan Post’s J-SOX internal control requirements. Their goal was to significantly simplify and reduce the number of integrations and data mapping points that were contributing to a time-consuming and error-prone month- end reporting process.
Once Toll’s Finance team saw the OneStream platform in action, they realised that the unified environment for consolidation, statutory reporting, management reporting and analysis could allow them to effectively address their key business requirements.
OneStream also offered a wealth of additional functionality and capability for implementation in future phases to further improve Toll’s operational processes and efficiencies.
With the assistance of James & Monroe (J&M), Toll Group realised that OneStream could very effectively satisfy their immediate Group statutory consolidation and reporting as well as Toll’s budgeting and forecasting requirements. OneStream’s unified platform approach, Cloud-based (MS Azure) model and proven record of customer success provided the confidence Toll Group needed to invest in OneStream as the future of finance.
Implementing Intelligent CPM
Toll Group selected James & Monroe as their OneStream implementation partner based on J&M’s 18+ years of experience in developing corporate performance management solutions (CPM) for some of Australia’s largest organisations.
Toll Group migrated all financial consolidation, statutory and management reporting, and budgeting and forecasting to the OneStream platform in the first phase of the project, significantly streamlining finance operations. Toll further leveraged the initial build by implementing a Tax Effective Accounting solution and enhancements to their budgeting and forecasting systems including the addition of bottom-up models, guided workflows, FX model scenarios and a Global Logistics customer profitability model. The replacement of the fragmented legacy systems with a single, unified OneStream platform is already paying dividends in terms of improved data quality, insight and process control.
Toll Group is now live and Peter Smith, Group Finance Manager of Toll Group, is happy that the transition was a success. “OneStream allows us to seamlessly roll-up our business units financial data to the group level,” said Smith. “The unified platform and the budgeting and forecasting enhancements OneStream facilitated mean that each subsidiary can model their budget at the level of detail required for their subsidiary and make the results immediately available to Group Finance.”
“In our early discussions with James & Monroe and OneStream, it became clear that they understood the challenges we were facing in Group Finance,” Smith continued. “The team of Toll, J&M and OneStream met every challenge along the way, including effectively handling issues with historical data exposed by the implementation, coordinating the vision and efforts of our geographically dispersed business units, and laying a solid foundation for future initiatives to extend the value of our investment in OneStream.”
Benefits of OneStream
Toll Group is seeing many benefits from switching to OneStream. First and foremost, the organisation now has a global consolidation platform allowing the reporting of all legal entity results on one system. Toll is also leveraging OneStream’s Extensible Dimensionality® to standardise reporting and business unit budgeting and forecasting processes. The impact on the Finance teams has been transformational.
OneStream has enabled a significant improvement in the accuracy and timeliness of reporting. In addition, Group governance has improved, with increased oversight on compliance activities and results analysis. OneStream’s automation of data loads and improved data quality has resulted in the elimination of a massive amount of manual data handling in Excel®. In addition, both Toll Group IT support costs and 3rd-party application support costs have been significantly reduced because of moving to OneStream hosted on MS Azure.
“Untangling our Oracle systems was challenging but OneStream provided the platform we needed to do it effectively. Moving to OneStream’s single, unified platform was a big change for the organisation to take on but all the business units are on-board with the benefits and are very happy with what has been delivered,” said Smith. “The fact that we can now trust the data in the system and all the organisation’s data is in one place and immediately visible when changes are made is a significant advantage. The delays we experienced with the legacy systems between the collection of data and the issuance of reports and analyses have been largely eliminated.”
Extending the Solution
Toll is currently evaluating additional initiatives to extend their investment, both in the core OneStream application and through OneStream’s MarketPlace solutions. Toll is currently undertaking
a pilot of OneStream’s Account Reconciliations & Transaction Matching MarketPlace solutions and is investigating potential future implementation of capabilities such as Cash Planning, Treasury schedules and registries and tax compliance reporting.
About the Implementation Partner
Since 2004 James & Monroe (J&M) have provided Advisory, Solution Design and Development, Application Support and Education services to our customers across both government and private sector. J&M have offices in Auckland, Melbourne, Mumbai, Wellington, Singapore and Sydney with over 70 full time product-specific experts employed across the company. J&M provide size, scalability, depth of experience and cost effectiveness.
J&M have been chosen as the implementation and support partners for some of the largest and most complex CPM / EPM implementations throughout Australia and New Zealand. Post-implementation, J&M continues to support its’ customers to help them maximise the value of their investment. For more information, visit JamesandMonroe.com.
