This article first appeared on OneStreamSoftware.com by Lauren Ford
To keep pace with ever-present business and technology change and challenges, organizations need a strong foundation for data and analytics on a global scale. Having these global insights enables sophisticated organizations to use evidence-based data to make decisions and plan carefully for their future. Doing so will open up possibilities to identify new business opportunities, to better serve customers, grow sales, and improve operations.
With the right corporate performance management (CPM) platform in place, organizations can gain a more holistic view of business data. By gaining the ability to analyze various levels of data between different countries, companies can gain vital information to better understand customer profitability with insight into vital data. This was the goal for OSI Group. A global food processor, OSI was experiencing difficulties digging into financial data at the customer, product, and geographic level with their legacy CPM application. But they were determined to make a change. Read on to hear their story.
Culinary Skill and Global Flavor Knowledge
Located in Aurora, Illinois, OSI Group is a 100-plus-year-old holding company of meat processors that service the retail and food service industries. A global leader in supplying value-added protein items and other food products to leading food service and retail brands, OSI’s products include meat patties, bacon, hot dogs, pizza, fish, poultry, and vegetable products. OSI today operates with 75 facilities in 17 countries and sells its products in 85 nations.
A Need to Unify Finance
OSI Group operates with a complex system landscape. The global company has over 15 ERP systems including many different versions of SAP primarily in North America, Microsoft AX, and Navision in Europe.
OSI was also using Oracle HFM for financial consolidation and reporting, but realized many inefficiencies for the global team, as well as the local entities, by using this legacy application. The reliance on manually loading data from ERPs by a CSV flat file into HFM created bottlenecks every month during the close process. The company was also using Hyperion FDM to load data, which added an intermediary step with separate software, separate license, and separate security. It was time-consuming and difficult for OSI to dig into data at the customer, product, or geographic level.
Facing a massive upgrade, and no solution in place for FP&A, OSI recognized the need to simplify financial operations with an intelligent finance platform. They became keenly focused on streamlining the data load process, while gaining the ability to address management reporting at the business unit level, and unifying financial processes in one platform.
Evaluation and Implementation
When it came time to evaluate CPM softwaresolutions, OSI had some key requirements in mind. One of those requirements was the ability to see revenues and profitability on global customers. Another was the capability to see different views of OSI’s global operations while having each roll up to one corporate reporting structure. OSI was also looking at implementing ASC 842 for lease accounting, and once they saw OneStream offered Lease Accounting plus several additional MarketPlace solutions, they knew it would be the best fit.
Hosted in the cloud with 250 users, OSI Group went live with OneStream in August 2021. With their implementation partner, Nova CPM, OSI group first replaced HFM with OneStream for financial consolidation as well as financial and management reporting. Next was implementing OneStream’s solution for Lease Accounting, followed by financial planning and analysis in phase two.
The value of OneStream’s sophisticated consolidation functionality, Extensible Dimensionality®, and ability to direct connect to SAP were all key reasons why OSI implemented OneStream’s Intelligent Finance Platform. The ease of use of OneStream, while encompassing all global ERPs, and their various levels of data, into one solution was a game changer.
Powerful Extensibility and Granularity
Before OneStream, there was a high dependency on the local accounting teams to answer questions about the data. But now the global team can instantly drill into the data in OneStream to get that granular level of detail to explain a difference. With OneStream’s extensibility, OSI’s Director of Corporate Accounting can pinpoint fluctuations to an account and work with the local managers on why it changed. With more visibility into the individual units reporting, OSI has cleaner, more uniform data for better reporting in the long run. Now being cloud-based, OSI teams around the world use the same data to talk the same results with management and executives.
OneStream is significantly easier and faster for the local entities to load their data into the system, saving them at least a day of work. OSI’s Japanese joint-venture has even shortened the financial reporting process by 2.5 days, by completing the process in half a day. And with more data integrated in OneStream, OSI can have real discussions around customer and product profitability – and the ability to be more consistent with reporting globally.
The Value of an All-In-One Platform
OSI is also using OneStream for the consolidated budget, with entities entering budgets in their local ERPs then loading their information into OneStream. OSI plans to use OneStream for the rolling forecast and a driver-based planning project slated for late 2022.
OneStream’s Lease Accounting solution from the OneStream™ MarketPlaceis being used across all of OSI’s global entities to tackle IFRS 16 and ASC 842 lease accounting requirements. With nearly 500 leases rolling through it, the solution enables OSI to easily make the necessary adjustments from IFRS 16 to US GAAP adjustment to get to a US GAAP view of the numbers.
In addition to Lease Accounting, OSI has also downloaded OneStream’s Transaction Matching solution from the MarketPlace and is looking into Task Manager as well. The company is also planning to test the Account Reconciliations solution for their corporate holding companies before rolling into Europe and Asia-Pacific entities. OneStream continues to enable OSI Group to unify financial consolidation, planning, reporting, and analysis through a single, extensible platform.
Learn More
To learn more about OSI Group’s journey from Hyperion to OneStream, check out the case study and discover how OneStream unified the global organization with powerful business insights. If your organization is ready for a finance transformation, contact OneStreamtoday.
