Empowering Finance Transformation with Simplicity and Flexibility

We’re really enabling better engagement for our Finance team by making their work more seamless, more efficient and more effective. We are giving them more engaging and exciting things to work on.

– Kayla Flanders | Director of Finance | Pella

Positioning Finance as a Strategic Business Partner with Better Data Integrity and Quality

Positioning Finance as a strategic business partner to corporate and line of business leadership is something Kayla Flanders, Director of Finance for Enterprise Vinyl at Pella Corporation, understands well. That positioning is something her team struggled with in legacy systems that didn’t provide reliable, quality and timely data. In fact, working through these financial processes was so difficult in legacy systems that the department was struggling with high turnover rates due to the difficulty involved in closing the books.

Before upgrading to OneStream, Finance struggled as sufficient time wasn’t available during the close process to correct errors stemming from the manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes. With OneStream, however, running profitability that previously took 24-36 hours to run can now be done in an hour or less when processing an entire year, and running actuals takes 5 minutes rather than the 4-6 hour cycle required in legacy systems. Those improvements allow the team to gain faster, better insights into the financial results during high-volume, critical periods of the financial close. It allows Finance to better serve the business with more insightful conversations. Instead of focusing on why and how the numbers evolved, the conversation centers on running the business.

This project is not a Finance project – it’s a business project. It really is enabling us to meet our strategic business objectives.Kayla Flanders | Director of Finance | Pella

Driving Better Business Results with Powerful Profitability Analysis

Prior to adopting OneStream, Pella knew it needed to assess its approach to many core Finance processes. “We came to realize as a Finance function we were not enabling our company to achieve its strategic business objectives in a sustainable, reliable way. And we knew we needed to make an upgrade to be able to do that,” Kayla Flanders explained. Profitability was one of the most powerful capabilities Pella unlocked by adopting the OneStream platform. Now, Pella can run its close and consolidation process at the entity level and perform profitability analyses based on the company’s four primary material types and within various brands. With the platform approach Pella can now run its profitability analysis in an hour, something that previously took 24-36 hours. The company can also now drill down from top-level brand views to plant views and set benchmarks to analyze cost and margin across orders based on the logistical aspects involved.

Before deploying OneStream, Pella was handling labor and overhead allocations in spreadsheets, and the time-consuming process didn’t allow for drill-back capability, wasn’t auditable and ultimately opened the process to manual errors. Now finance can help run the business by talking across departments such as Sales and plant sites to drive demand based on the margin or profit pool. The team can also analyze volume units, price volume and perform mix analyses that help run the business and determine profitability.

Unleashing Finance with Speed and Agility

We’re able to provide them more information and more insightful information more quickly than we’ve been able to do in the past.

– Kayla Flanders | Director of Finance | Pella

Prior to adopting OneStream, the Finance team was struggling with lots of manual processes and extensive time investments to execute work instead of focusing on more important and value-added tasks. Implementing the OneStream platform has enabled the Finance team to spend more time focused on tasks that drive business performance – such as strategic analysis – instead of manually aggregating and cleaning data, and spending time troubleshooting and investigating errors and inconsistencies.

Looking to the Future with OneStream

“We know the problems that we’re trying to solve today, but those problems in the future we’re not sure what those are yet. ESG, some of the machine learning that we see today, those we wouldn’t have thought about 5 or 10 years ago. We know there will be a future thing out there and the platform is scalable and flexible enough to be able to do that without having to add another point in time solution” explains Kayla Flanders.

Pella has gone live with Close & Consolidation, Budgeting and Profitability solutions, and continues to expand its OneStream footprint with Leasing, Tax Provision and forecasting capabilities. Today, with around 120 OneStream users (mainly from the Finance function), Pella continues to look to expand its use of the platform and bring more stakeholders from outside Finance into the system.