This article first appeared on OneStreamSoftware.com by Jaclyn Proctor
In today’s global economy, logistical and supply chain disruptions are part of the new normal. Economic slowdowns are challenging organisations to anticipate supply strains, constantly changing consumer demand, labor shortages, and logistical support. To overcome these challenges, organisations need to be armed with agile insights, streamlined processes, and real-time data to remain resilient.
With a unified corporate performance management (CPM) platform, organisations have access to critical financial and operational data to quickly address challenges through data-backed insights and scenario planning. In this blog post, learn how Toll Group, a global transportation and logistic company, turned to OneStream to streamline its outdated and disjointed financial processes and the efficiencies they gained through this digital transformation.
Problem Solving for Global Logistics and Distribution
Toll Group is a global logistics, distribution and freight forwarding business. As part of Japan Post, Toll Group has dual headquarters in Melbourne and Singapore with approximately 20,000 team members to help solve any logistics, transport, or global supply chain challenges. Toll Group supports more than 20,000 customers worldwide and operates across 500 sites in 25 countries, with an Asia Pacific focus and a forward network spanning 150 countries.
Streamlining a Complex EPM Landscape
Toll Group was challenged operating with an outdated and fragmented ERP landscape and using Oracle Hyperion and EPM Cloud applications for financial close, consolidation, reporting, budgeting and forecasting. This system was complex, disjointed and costly to maintain and support. As Oracle’s support for their existing version of Hyperion was ending, Toll Group decided to re-evaluate their options in search of a more strategic, streamlined and better-integrated CPM platform.
Toll’s goal was to have the statutory consolidation and reporting processes for all legal entities handled by a single group team in a single system. Unifying this process would allow Group governance and oversight on compliance activities and results analysis, while enabling divisional team resources to focus on internal budgeting and forecasting performance reporting and local ledger reporting development.
Selecting OneStream as the Future of Finance
Toll Group embarked on a market scan to investigate alternative solutions, with a key business requirement of having one common consolidation and reporting platform across the organisation to address complexity. They also wanted to move to the cloud with the goal of significantly streamlining the number of integrations and data mapping points that were contributing to their time-consuming and error-prone month-end reporting process.
After seeing a demo of the OneStream platform in action, Toll Group’s Finance team realised that a unified environment for consolidation, statutory reporting, management reporting and analysis could allow them to effectively address key business requirements. The Finance team saw firsthand how OneStream offered a wealth of additional functionality, with the capability to improve Toll’s operational processes and efficiencies now and the flexibility to address future challenges as the company grows.
With OneStream’s unified platform approach, cloud-based model and proven record of customer success, Toll Group decided to invest in OneStream as the future of finance. With the help of OneStream partner James & Monroe, Toll Group implemented OneStream for financial consolidation, statutory and management reporting, and budgeting and forecasting.
Following the initial implementation, Toll Group decided to further leverage 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.
According to Peter Smith, Group Finance Manager at Toll Group, “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.”
Leading at Speed
Replacing their fragmented legacy systems with OneStream’s single, unified platform is already paying dividends for Toll Group through improved data quality, insight and process control. Through OneStream, Toll Group is able manage 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.
Toll Group has seen transformational effects and significant improvement in the accuracy and timeliness of reporting since implementing OneStream. OneStream’s automated processes have improved data quality, eliminating the need to manually handle massive amounts of data in Excel®. Additionally, Toll Group significantly reduced IT support costs and 3rd-party application support costs by migrating to OneStream’s cloud-based platform.
“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.”
Looking Ahead
Toll Group is evaluating additional initiatives to extend their investment in OneStream through both their core application and OneStream MarketPlace solutions. They are currently undertaking a pilot of OneStream’s Account Reconciliations & Transaction Matching MarketPlace solutions and investigating future implementations of capabilities including Cash Planning, Treasury schedules and registries, and tax compliance reporting.
Learn More
To learn more about Toll Group’s journey from Oracle Hyperion to OneStream, check out the case study and discover how OneStream unified the global organisation with powerful business insights. If your organisation is ready for a finance transformation, contact OneStream today.
