Amer Sports

There's no better way to illustrate the power of SensibleAI forecasts than hearing directly from a customer like Amer Sports. Let's hear their story. Please welcome, from Amer Sports, Rick Martel, and from PwC, Leonardo DiBiase.

Good afternoon. I'm Leonardo DiBiase, One Stream Alliance lead with PwC, but most of you know me like the Italian guy with the scarf. And actually, if you were guessing, I have the scarf in Florida as well.

No worries. But we are not here to talk about my scarf collection. We are here to talk about an incredible transformation journey that moved from the now of the finance excellence to the next of the innovation that the SensibleAI is bringing.

We are talking here, we are going to talk about Amer Sports. How many of you know about Amer Sports? Amer Sports. No many. Rick, do you have any idea? You know, Leo, I think they don't know us as AmrSports.

I think they may know some of our brands, though. So let's roll the footage. Let's roll the footage. Goodbye! Thank you. Hello, everybody. I'm Rick Martell, the Director of Financial and Planning at Amer Sports.

I've had the pleasure of working in the sporting goods industry and retail for over 15 years. I've worked in massive finance organizations, and I've worked in finance organizations where I was the whole organization.

So when Amer Sports called about two years ago, I recognized the opportunity and challenge immediately. Imagine running a $6 billion portfolio of world-class sporting brands, each with its own identity, its own culture, and its own way of doing things.

That's Amer Sports, essentially. And for a long time, that was also the challenge. We weren't one company. We were many companies that happened to share one owner. It's an incredible portfolio. Now, managing that diversity requires a sophisticated backbone.

And that's when we turned to Leo. I have to say, every time that I see that video, I feel so pumped up. I want to start running, but I cannot now. This incredible portfolio of brands needed a very strong backbone for financials.

Think about people that were from Vancouver to Shanghai through Chicago and Helsinki. You have to monitor everybody from New York. With PwC, we are used to big transformation. But what we were facing in that moment that we started the engagement was like more, I could call it a Pokemon card collection, but instead of cards were tools and license costs.

We had Oracle FCCS just implemented that was not giving the right answers to the new CFO. There were one single tool with the SAP Oracle Excel for planning in each of the different brands. There was an ongoing phase zero of an S4 HANA for just one region.

And there was a possible central finance project to start. It took me 15 minutes, honestly, to understand what one thing could do and save in terms of money and time for Amherst Sports. Two weeks later, we were in New York with the CFO that told us, listening in a great way, we have one finance goal.

Bring me this. Bring me this. And five months later, after they stopped the central finance project, they paused the S4 HANA design. We were live already with consolidation. But what was coming next was the most exciting things.

And that is when Rick came to the project. That's right. So essentially, when Leo came on board, we already had our consolidation engine. They brought it to us here using OneStream consolidation. And that was our single source of the truth for financial reporting.

It was we had multiple ERPs floating around, and we had one trusted output through OneStream. It gave us the foundation, but we knew that we had to speak the language of finance. So we essentially asked every brand, geography, and channel out there, what if the organization had one language for financial planning? We brought finance leaders together in person for the first time.

Across the world, we called it the design council. Really, the first time they have ever been in the same room before, from brands that had historically operated independently. And together, we defined planning requirements, we fought over hierarchies, but we agreed, ultimately, on how to performance the business as one.

We think of our planning architecture essentially as a wedding cake. At the top, we had a wedding cake. At the top, leadership has visibility into the highest level, making fast, confident decisions. Below that, connected layers of detailed operational planning that fed directly into the view.

Every tier was essentially informed. Every tier is connected, no layer flying blind. OneStream was our key enabler for this, and the collaboration was the breakthrough. The planning project was the planning project.

The planning project was ongoing. We have all these people from all around the globe talking each other finally the same language, talking about something that was coming. But we realized that we realized that we realized that we realized that we realized that there was a need of speed.

There was a need of, give me value right now. So we identified which one is the brand that is more in this need. Which one is the process that needs, because it's very high value, but time consuming, where we actually can do something bigger.

And while the planning project was ongoing, we started the SensibleAI, a SensibleAI project that actually was in eight weeks, bringing back to that specific brand something big. What was your experience? That's right.

So like Leo said, it was only an eight week rollout essentially for sensible AI, and it really made us change the way that we thought about doing things. AI became our first reviewer. And before a finance partner walks into the room for a business conversation, the model has already flagged anomalies, surface trends, and generated the first draft of the narrative.

We essentially enabled our organization to speak the business language in real time. So accuracy gains, time savings, and our finance pros were freed up to do the things they essentially were brought on to do, which is challenge the status quo and build relationships to drive the strategy.

So I know everybody here is stressed on bringing AI into their business. I was too. I think that's why they invited me. But honestly, after eight weeks with sensible AI, this pilot really, really made the team comfortable with it.

We know that we had a one data model, and essentially, we could trust what the AI was built off of. So finally, if you take one thing from the stage today, it's that your tools can only go as far as your team.

So we didn't win just because of this fantastic technology that we're celebrating today, but we won because we brought people along the journey. We gave them a seat at the table, essentially, before it was even built.

With OneStream, we're enabling the transformation. But bringing the people together, bringing the leadership that was engaged with us and identify where sensible AI was creating the value right away was the key.

We were lucky because every transformation. We were lucky because every transformation can be successful or not based on your ability to challenge the status quo. Apply the critical thinking on what you are doing.

Don't be scared of starting something if you didn't have finished something before. If you finish your planning process and it's 100% ready, you're probably late. For this reason, I really would like to thank you, Rick, for your leadership and your ability to listen, to bring the value that OneStream is creating for Amersport and for everybody that is using OneStream.

Thank you very much.