By John O'Rourke December 22, 2016
If you've been shopping around for an EPM solution or stay relatively informed of the goings-on in the industry, chances are you've heard about OneStream XF. This corporate performance management solution was created by Bob Powers, the inventor of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), and Tom Shea, the founder and inventor of Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (FDM).
If you didn't know about the founders of OneStream already, or if that's the only thing you know, then this is the blog post for you. We'll explain why the OneStream platform was developed and what's different about it. Spoiler alert: core CPM solutions abilities, including financial consolidation, planning, and account reconciliations, live in one application for a simplified user experience.
Origins
You already know about Tom Shea, OneStream's president, and Bob Powers, the company's VP and CTO. Shea is the visionary behind OneStream XF — he wanted to create a user-friendly yet powerful platform that is easy to deploy and maintain.
But it's not just Shea and Powers with years of great experience. Each member of the OneStream team has delivered CPM solutions for more than 15 years. The entire leadership team, from the CFO to the VP of Sales, has experience with Oracle Hyperion.
With experience in developing some of the most widely used EPM applications, the OneStream team understands the complex issues that customers face. It was with this knowledge that OneStream originated — the software seeks to eliminate any complications with a unified platform that can meet all your external as well as your internal finance organization needs. OneStream was founded under the principle that organizations would no longer have to choose between a single purpose application that only meets their planning needs or an application that only meets their financial consolidation needs. With OneStream, it's all in one place, on one platform.
Financial Consolidation and Reporting
At the core of OneStream XF is financial consolidation and reporting. OneStream promises to simplify financial reporting for the most complex organizations.
Instead of having various applications across the office of finance — a siloed structure that is vulnerable to data inconsistencies — a unified performance management platform like OneStream creates a single source of truth.
OneStream's financial consolidation and reporting promises to deliver several things, including:
Amore complete system with true multi-GAAP, multi-entity, multi-currency, automated IC eliminations, minority interest, and partial ownership
Increased automation with the capability to automate cash flow reporting and a better understanding of the movement of accounts with a packaged Flow Dimension
Improvement of controls with embedded data quality that adds the power of guided workflows and complete audit controls to ensure accuracy
Afaster close with the ability to immediately identify errors and increased transparency for more expedient resolutions
Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting
Planning and budgeting teams remain separate from financial consolidation and reporting teams largely because their systems don't integrate. Unfortunately, both teams need the data in the other's systems to compare actual versus budget. What the office of finance gets instead is data inconsistency.
The planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities of OneStream XF promise guided and controlled processes that allow you to adapt as your business changes. OneStream guarantees to improve your planning processes in these four ways:
Simplified use through the familiarity of Excel and workflow
Unified reporting with combined operational and planning processes
Improved agility with one rational system where actual, budget, and forecast all live together
Reduced budget cycles with seed budgets or rolling forecasts through an automated data copy between scenarios
- Terry Ledet
Terry Ledet is a seasoned financial systems professional, at US-Analytics, with expertise in developing complex financial reporting, accounting, and planning applications. With 18+ years of experience in project and resource management, Terry possesses the ability to identify and translate a client's needs into an actionable technical solution.
