By John O'Rourke November 15, 2017
How do you address the following situation? You work in a global company that has outgrown its financial consolidation and reporting software. The system has been bastardized to address increasingly complex currency and intercompany requirements. Cash flow reporting and other processes are handled in disconnected spreadsheets. Financial and management reporting takes too long and lacks sufficient detail to support effective decision making.
This was the focus of a recent webinar hosted by OneStream Software, featuring Robert Thompson, Global Controller for Victaulic Corporation. Here's a summary of what was covered in the webinar.
Who is Victaulic?
Victaulic may not be a household name, but this almost 100-year old company is the leading producer of mechanical pipe joining solutions in the world. With 2000+ patents, and over 3600 employees at 40+ facilities globally, they build technologies and provide engineering services that address the most complex piping challenges faced by engineers, site owners, contractors and distributors. These solutions put people to work faster, while increasing safety, ensuring reliability and maximizing efficiency.
What Were Their Challenges?
The trigger for this project was the need to replace their outdated Hyperion Enterprise system, which was going off support, and was no longer meeting their requirements. Key requirements included improving data quality, simplifying the monthly close process, and gaining more consistent and accessible reporting for Finance and operations managers.
Financial reporting and planning data was fragmented in several different systems. Their chart of accounts in Hyperion Enterprise had ballooned out of control in an effort to support intercompany eliminations and alternate currency reporting. And, cash flow reporting was done manually in Excel without the benefit of process transparency or audit controls.
Why Did They Select OneStream?
Starting with a list of 4 vendors, Victaulic focused their detailed evaluation of software solutions on OneStream and Oracle/Hyperion EPM applications. After a rigorous evaluation, OneStream was selected due to several factors:
- One unified solution – consolidation, reporting, budgeting, forecasting, analysis
- Easier to use, maintain and upgrade
- Built-in controls and audit trails
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Additional functionality available with no cost (XF MarketPlace)
- "Every Customer is a Reference"
According to Mr. Thompson, "we considered other CPM vendors but once we met with OneStream we knew they were the perfect fit for our environment. We do not have a lot of IT resources available for system maintenance so having one platform, one language and a clean system reduces maintenance and the amount of work required to run it."
How are They Using OneStream?
Victaulic initially implemented OneStream for financial consolidation, forecasting and budgeting as well as financial and management reporting. Significant benefits were achieved around data quality by providing validation checks during the data submission process which made data more readily available. They were also able to standardize workflows and reports across the enterprise. OneStream's Guided Workflows simplify processes and tasks allowing users to focus on data quality and results instead of system mechanics, with pre-and post-load validations for all scenarios. Guided Reporting allowed users to run and view their books of reports right from within the workflow. OneStream also provided efficient drill-through capabilities into their transactional detail, something they were not capable of doing in their previous environment.
Victaulic implemented a fully automated Cash Flow solution using OneStream, with the ability to generate "3-D" Cash Flow reports for audit and for internal management use. The Cash Flow solution replaced their offline Excel spreadsheets.
Additionally, Victaulic enhanced their "bridge data" collection and analysis capabilities by collecting more detail inside the system, by running validations on the explained bridge amounts and by providing simple, powerful dashboards and reports for analyzing variances and the bridge explanations.
And as an additional bonus, Victaulic is implementing two, no-cost,OneStream XF MarketPlace solutions - Tax Provisioning and Account Reconciliations. And there's more planned.
What Benefits Has Victaulic Seen?
While Robert Thompson of Victaulic has many plans for expanding their use of the application, they have already achieved many business benefits.
- One application that delivers multiple solutions that live and work together
- Greatly Improved monthly close process
- Improved data quality leveraging numerous confirmation rules, validation and certification
- Visibility and consistency into subsidiary data
- Automated cash flow reporting
- Enhanced currency reporting and analysis
- Enhanced bridge and flux analysis
- Guided reporting for Finance and business users
How Can You Learn More?
-John O'Rourke
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.
