This article first appeared on the OneStream blog by John O’Rourke
Innovation is central to the success of the modern finance function and the businesses in which they operate. Innovation has also been at the heart of OneStream’s DNA since the company’s early days of R&D and has propelled us to market leadership and delivering on our mission of 100% customer success. Having designed and developed some of the most successful Oracle Hyperion products, OneStream’s founders had a great deal of domain knowledge and first-hand insights into what worked and what didn’t with the first generation of corporate performance management (CPM) applications.
With a chance to start with a clean slate, OneStream’s founders created a next-generation CPM platform that overcame many of the barriers finance organizations faced in aligning reporting and planning in larger, sophisticated enterprises.
They leveraged their deep domain expertise, combined with state-of-the-art technologies, to design a unified CPM platform that could replace multiple legacy products. They also had the vision of providing a CPM platform that worked like an iPhone. One that provided out-of-the-box functionality to address key CPM requirements, with the ability to be extended through a marketplace of downloadable solutions that could be configured and deployed quickly and easily by customers.
FSN Innovation Showcase 2020
This innovation DNA and its impact on customer success is the focus of the 2020 FSN Innovation Showcase report on OneStream Software. In the report, Gary Simon (CEO FSN & Leader of the Modern Finance Forum on LinkedIn) highlights three key innovations that have made OneStream so successful in replacing spreadsheets and multiple legacy CPM applications at over 500 organizations globally.
- Extensible Dimensionality® – allows organizations with complex structures to satisfy local and central information requirements without compromise and to change sympathetically with the business as the organization changes shape or grows. It also provides corporate Finance and other executives complete visibility into business unit detail as they analyze summarized financial results- with drill down capabilities into the operational details, and through to transactional systems.
- The OneStream XF MarketPlace – modeled on an app-store concept, customers can select the solutions they need, quickly download them onto their existing OneStream CPM system, configure and deploy them to address new requirements, without having to resort to in-house development, spreadsheet workarounds or integrating third-party software. Users of the MarketPlace simply choose the most relevant applications to add to their OneStream platform. And because these solutions are written to the same design and development standards as the core CPM platform, the approach greatly reduces the time, risks and complexity typically associated with adding specialized functionality.
- Analytic Blend – this is an innovation recently brought to market by OneStream which provides a relational column store index that enables organizations to combine governed financial data with detailed operational data in a shared CPM environment. Instead of pushing financial data to a BI platform or data warehouse, customers can bring all the supplemental data they need for comprehensive analysis into OneStream XF. This enables them to retain all financial intelligence, governance, workflow and the single trusted source of the financial truth that’s available in OneStream and simply blend in additional data needed for comprehensive, controlled and easily consumable dashboards and analytics.
Innovation in Action
The report finishes up with several OneStream customer examples highlighting the power of the platform and its innovations. This includes Xylem, which replaced multiple instances of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning, Hyperion FDM and FDMEE with a single instance of OneStream’s unified CPM platform. This case study demonstrates the power of OneStream’s Extensible Dimensionality to support corporate and line of business requirements for financial close, reporting and planning in a single application.
The other featured customer is Dril-Quip, which replaced Excel spreadsheets and manual processes that were being used for financial close, consolidation, reporting and planning with OneStream’s unified CPM platform. OneStream provided the company with a unified and streamlined solution for all their financial consolidations, internal and external reporting, rolling forecasts, and analysis. Then using the innovate OneStream XF MarketPlace, Dril-Quip extended their investment by implementing Sales Planning, People Planning and Capital Planning solutions to quickly address additional business requirements.
Learn More
To learn more, download the FSN Innovation Showcase on OneStream Software and feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about how OneStream can help you modernize finance, simplify processes, and extend CPM across the enterprise.
