Leveraging Analytic Blend to Report On Large Volumes of Daily Transactional Data

BDO USA, LLP, is a U.S. professional services firm providing assurance, tax, and advisory services to a wide range of publicly traded and privately held companies. For more than 100 years, BDO has provided quality service through the active involvement of experienced and committed professionals. BDO serves multi-national clients through more than 60 offices and over 650 independent alliance firm locations nationwide and across 162 countries.

"We now have happy users who are able to absorb information the way they want with self-service reporting and dashboards. This includes a wide range of information, not just financial—including managing people and clients."

- Financial Executive, BDO

1. Moving on from Oracle Hyperion.

BDO had been using several Oracle Hyperion applications since 2009 to support their planning, reporting and analysis processes. Over time their deployment had grown to include three Hyperion Planning applications and nine Essbase reporting cubes spanning ledger data, contracts, employees, projects, demand and workforce reporting. This complex landscape of applications led to multiple versions of the truth, manual data movement, system stability and availability issues as the data volumes grew, and ongoing maintenance challenges. It was time for a change.

The BDO team evaluated several alternatives and selected OneStream as their go-forward solution. OneStream was selected because it met three primary requirements: scalability, information delivery, and data integrity. OneStream offers a platform that would handle larger data volumes as BDO grows, and empowers key decision makers with accurate information, rich dashboarding and reporting capabilities. By combining multiple disparate data sets, OneStream creates "One Source of the Truth" for BDO.

2. Transforming Financial Planning & Reporting.

The BDO team had several objectives in mind as they started their OneStream implementation. They wanted to replace their current Hyperion solutions with a unified CPM solution that is easier to administer, maintain and own while supporting simplified data flows.

They also wanted to streamline and improve the financial planning submission / collection process and enhance the reporting and analysis capabilities for FP&A users with deeper information and insights. From a financial close and reporting standpoint, they wanted to enhance the data and processes they were utilizing, and align their external, legal, management and FP&A reporting.

The BDO team launched a multi-phase project that initially focused on implementing OneStream for actuals reporting. Then in the second phase, they extended the application to support their budgeting and planning process. A key capability that was delivered as part of the solution was a central landing page for all users.

"BDO wanted the users' first experience with OneStream to be seamless, starting with a page that could guide them to each key area of the application and provide critical status information."

- Financial Executive, BDO

3. Leveraging Extensible Dimensionality & Analytic Blend.

BDO leverages OneStream's Extensible Dimensionality framework to address different levels of detail between budget / forecast collection and actuals reporting. This is leveraged across the Accounts, Cost Centers and Departments dimension in their application, providing additional granularity for reporting and planning across various lines of business — all in a single application.

BDO was one of the first customers to leverage OneStream's Analytic Blend capabilities to report and analyze on large volumes of daily transactional data.

"BDO loads 10 million records nightly, which is transformed into 30 to 40 million rows of data in OneStream's Analytic Blend engine, with over 300 trillion cell intersections. After a few hours of processing, this data is then available to BDO's users via their interactive dashboards."

- Financial Executive, BDO

4. Unleashing the Value of Finance.

As a result of this project, the BDO team now has a reliable and stable system supporting their mission-critical planning and reporting processes. BDO has enabled their users to shift more of their time to value-added analysis vs. system maintenance.

"We now have happy users who are able to absorb information the way they want with self-service reporting and dashboards. This includes a wide range of information, not just financial—including managing people and clients."

- Financial Executive, BDO

Through OneStream's unified application, there's now a direct linkage between actual and budget — avoiding the need to transfer data between different systems for analysis. And the BDO Finance team is very pleased with the high level of customer support and responsiveness they are getting from OneStream, and the internal development team is more willing to take on enhancement requests.

While BDO has achieved a lot in a short period of time with their OneStream implementation, there are more opportunities on the horizon. The team is now evaluating the use of OneStream for rolling forecasts, as well as several additional OneStream solutions including Account Reconciliations and Predictive Analytics.