By John O'Rourke June 13, 2018
MEC Global Modernizes Finance – Takes the Leap from Hyperion to OneStream
When I joined Hyperion Software in 1997, I was the Product Marketing Director for Hyperion Enterprise, which was the market-leading financial consolidation and reporting application back in the 90s. The product was simple, did the job very effectively, was easy for Finance to maintain. Thousands of companies relied on it to manage their monthly/quarterly financial consolidation and reporting process. And amazingly, some companies are still using Hyperion Enterprise today.
Hanging onto a Legacy
While Hyperion Enterprise was a great product in its day, it had several limitations. For example, it only had four dimensions - periods, accounts, categories and entities. It also wasn't web-enabled or scalable to thousands of users. To remedy these limitations, Hyperion built a next-generation product, Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and launched that in 2001.
While many Hyperion Enterprise customers migrated to HFM over the ensuing
years, some elected to stick with good old Hyperion Enterprise, even though the product had reached the end of its lifecycle and was taken off premier support by Oracle in 2013. Yet here we are in 2018 and there are still companies using Hyperion Enterprise for financial reporting. Why? Because Finance users will often hang onto software products they are comfortable with, despite them being off support and requiring them to maintain older versions of Microsoft Windows and Office just to support the legacy system.
But when a software solution starts becoming unstable, loses data, and delays the close process – it might be time for a change. And that creates an opportunity to leapfrog other companies by moving to the most modern software solutions.
Modernizing Finance at MEC Global
This was the case at MEC Global, a Hyperion Enterprise user until 2017. MEC Global was using Hyperion Enterprise for financial consolidation and reporting. As an unsupported and aging solution, the software was becoming unstable and was losing data at critical times. This was slowing down the period-end close and consolidation process as users had to re-enter data and adjustments. In addition, due to its limited dimensionality the system was no longer supporting the reporting and analysis needs of the business. They needed something more flexible.
After evaluating other solutions offered by Oracle, including HFM, MEC Global selected OneStream XF. The selection of OneStream was based on its unified architecture, and ability to handle the consolidation of actual results, budgets and audit details all in a single application.
After initially deploying OneStream XF for financial consolidation and reporting of actual financial results, MEC Global extended their use of the application to cash flow forecasting, collection of auditing information and loading budgets. The next phase of the project will include moving the budgeting data collection process into OneStream and extending the platform to support the new Lease Accounting requirements under IFRS 16.
Taking the Leap to OneStream
In essence, MEC Global was able to "leapfrog" an entire generation of consolidation software by skipping over HFM and implementing OneStream. They are now benefiting from having a modern platform, that unifies financial consolidation, reporting, planning, analysis and data quality – and a marketplace of additional solutions they can download, configure and deploy to address additional requirements such as lease accounting, account reconciliations, Capex planning and others. And they can choose to continue running OneStream in their on-premise data center, or move it to the cloud if and when they desire.
To learn more, watch and listen to the replay of a recent OneStream webinar featuring MEC Global. And contact OneStream if you are ready to take the leap into the future.
John O'Rourke is Vice President of Product Marketing at OneStream Software. With a background in accounting and finance, John has over 30 years of experience in the software industry, including 20 years of experience in product marketing at Hyperion Solutions, Oracle and Host Analytics. He has worked with many customers and partners on financial reporting and planning initiatives and has spoken and written on many topics in corporate performance management. John has also held positions in strategic marketing and product marketing at Dun & Bradstreet Software, Kenan Systems and Decisyon. Find me on:
