By John O'Rourke April 29, 2019
Get to know our first customer, Federal Mogul, and why they chose OneStream!
Q. What were your main challenges with the solution you were using before OneStream?
A. Federal Mogul was using Hyperion Enterprise for consolidation and reporting, and our main challenge was having limited dimensionality. We needed more operational details and better reporting & analysis.
Q. How did your relationship with OneStream get started?
A. We have had a long relationship with the founders even before OneStream. Federal Mogul was UpStream Software's third customer and we had great success with it. There was already a level of trust there that was important if you are going to be customer number one. We approached this as a true partnership. OneStream gave us assurances that they would not try to sell and implement more customers until we were successful and we provided valuable feedback to OneStream so they could continually improve the initial version for Federal Mogul.
Q. Were any partners involved in the project?
A. Yes, Finit was involved in the initial design and implementation of OneStream.
Q. What did you see in OneStream that gained your trust?
A. As I mentioned earlier - a big factor was the long relationship going back to the UpStream days and history of delivering success.
Q. What was the scope of your initial engagement with OneStream?
A. Our initial focus was on financial consolidation, financial and management reporting.
Q. How did OneStream respond to requests for additional features?
A. A lot of time and effort was spent by the team, there was a high level of responsiveness.
Q. When did you first go live with OneStream?
A. We went live in 2014 with OneStream for financial consolidation & reporting.
Q. What have been the main advantages of OneStream for Federal Mogul?
A. Several things come to mind, including;
Workflow: OneStream gave FM visibility to what was happening throughout the close process in terms of: where the numbers came from; when they were loaded or reloaded; who loaded; what has yet to be loaded, etc.
Intercompany Reconconciliations: this process was always a very time-consuming task for Corporate to chase down. Once OneStream was implemented, the locations were now a part of the process as they could see who had I/C balances with them and have visibility to the other location's workflow status to see if they had loaded yet. The locations could now be a part of the I/C reconciliation process. This cut down on the time it took to reconcile these numbers during the close.
General Reporting: Moving to OneStream opened the door to standardizing most of the reporting needs of the company. This was a large endeavor, but overall, widely accepted. The reporting is dynamic and the ability to drill down into data, link to other cube views and couple this with the added dimensionality, FM was in a better place in this respect.
Headcount Reporting: We refined the headcount input process and reporting with OneStream as it related to monthly management reporting. This was possible due to "Guided Workflow" and the ability to extend the application.
GVAT Reporting: This process was taken to a new level, so we no longer had to collect spreadsheet detail and re-key figures and comments into a master/mega file. Instead, controllers could complete the analysis in a template, submit it into OneStream, and the system would do the work.
Q. How have you expanded your use of OneStream since the initial project?
A. Since we went live with OneStream People Planning was added, for our PowerTrain and Motor Parts divisions, supporting detailed employee level planning. We can now tie out loaded names to summary detail. Budgeting and forecasting is also done within OneStream. No driver-based planning currently. Budgets and forecasts are collected through Excel templates. We're also looking at Account Reconciliations as a future project.
Q. Are you leveraging any of the XF MarketPlace solutions?
A. Yes - we are using People Planning, Diagnostics 123. We're looking at Account Reconciliations, Thing Planning, and Task Manager.
Q. What's your take on the success to date for OneStream? What do you think the future holds for us?
A. OneStream is doing a fantastic job - meeting customer needs, continuing to evolve the platform, making improvements and staying ahead of the competition. It's helpful being able to speak directly with the executive team to provide input - especially Tom Shea and Bob Powers.
Q. What are your future plans for leveraging OneStream?
A. We want to expand our use of OneStream for management reporting, as we're mostly using Excel Retrieves today. We want to expand into driver-based planning, and dashboards.
We're evaluating the Request-It solution from Finit. and we're looking forward to OneStream XF 5.0 with load balancing capabilities. This will be great for large customers like Federal Mogul, and an improvement over the current round-robin approach.
Our parent company Tenneco was using Oracle HFM, and recently made the case for moving to OneStream. So it will be adopted more broadly by them next year.
