OneStream Empowers Customers to Make Faster and More Informed Decisions with Azure

Empowered decision-making with OneStream 

OneStream provides a market-leading intelligent finance platform that reduces the complexity of financial operations. OneStream unleashes the power of finance by unifying corporate performance management (CPM) processes such as planning, financial close & consolidation, reporting and analytics through a single solution. 

Organizations continue to deal with the accelerating pace of change from external factors (e.g., pandemic, geopolitics) and internal complexities (e.g., increasing data volumes, more enterprise systems). Enterprise finance and operational leaders are facing more pressure to develop integrated business planning and reporting processes that enable agile and comprehensive decision-making across all aspects of the organization. 

"OneStream offers CFO’s, CIO’s and operational leaders the opportunity to think different when it comes to CPM. For the first time, organizations can take a true platform approach to deliver and unify enterprise planning, reporting analytics across all aspects of the organization. And do so with the power of Azure to continually evolve and scale as business needs change” says Tom Shea, Chief Executive Officer of OneStream. 

A single piece of software to evolve entire organizations

Offering a full end-to-end platform for data quality, financial reporting, budgeting planning and forecasting and deep analytics including built in AutoAI capabilities, OneStream has been instrumental in helping organizations retire legacy point solutions from Oracle, SAP, IBM and more recently Anaplan across manufacturing, retail, financial services and other verticals. They have helped hundreds of customers in their digital transformation journey move to the cloud with the help of Microsoft Azure. 

For instance, manufacturer Fruit of the Loom was struggling with compatibility and support issues with Oracle Hyperion Financial Management for financial consolidation and reporting. They turned to OneStream not only because of its functionality, but its ability to extend the solution into budgeting, planning and account reconciliations. They’ve improved processes with automation and have better visibility into operating results. And they’re able to avoid third party products for a more integrated solution. 

Herbalife Nutrition is another OneStream success story. The company was operating multiple legacy products, including Oracle Hyperion, Planning, FDM, Essbase and EPMA. This created a highly manual modeling and reporting process. It also hindered their ability to report on project-level detail. By implementing OneStream, Herbalife Nutrition was able to automate cash flow reporting and streamline data entry and calculation. Results are quicker with more transparency. And OneStream gave users the ability to see project code results for revenue and costs – something they had been unable to do despite the many products available. 

“We were integrating from many different applications, including Oracle ERP to multiple Oracle Hyperion applications, yet they were all behaving independently,” said Vanita Thornton, Sr. Director Global Operational Accounting and Financial Systems at Herbalife Nutrition. 

“OneStream helps Herbalife perform a very complicated calculations.” Thornton explains. “For example, our own manufacturing plants purchase raw material from both internal and external suppliers. Once the products are made, the related finished products would sell to our own distribution entities in US and in Luxembourg before they sell to other Herbalife entities. As such, many of our SKUs have multi-levels of transfer profit in different currencies that became impossible for anyone to perform the calculation of manually. OneStream has enabled us to easily peel back the layers, provide reporting for users and review the month to month fluctuation at item level by entity.” 

The power of a Microsoft partnership

Partnering with Microsoft has been key for OneStream in helping these organizations transform. 

“A lot of organizations today, unfortunately, are still relying on antiquated technology that create waste over time because the burden is often on Finance and IT teams to constantly move and reconcile data and stitch point solutions together – and that is just to get the basic job done,” says Scott Stern, VP of Global Product Marketing & Strategy for OneStream. “What OneStream gives these organizations in any of these verticals is the opportunity to think completely different. A single piece of software not only evolves finance teams, but it’s also software for the entire office, from accounting, reporting and planning to sales, marketing and operations. We’re giving companies a pragmatic and trusted way to accelerate their businesses with technology that enables transformation at scale.” 

“Organizations have to make a basic choice, says Stern  Do you want to continue to make siloed investments in point solutions that solve for very specific processes and continue to rack up technical debt?  Or is your organization ready to think at a platform level to invest into technology that has the scale and flexibility to address a number of key business processes across Finance and lines of business.  It’s why coming to the table with the trust Azure brings is an amazing value proposition for organizations who are thinking about digital transformation or considering the move to the cloud.” 

Purpose Built AI and Machine Learning for Finance 

OneStream strongly believes that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) by finance and operations offices is a matter of when – not if. Both AI and ML will help finance teams and business analysts analyze and correlate the most relevant internal/external variables that contribute to forecasting accuracy and performance across the Sales, Supply Chain, HR, and Marketing processes that comprise financial plans and results.  

OneStream’s AutoAI solution, Sensible ML, is designed to productize time-series ML modeling for CPM and break down the traditionally high barriers to entry of advanced analytics for organizations. This includes but is not limited to data ingestion, auto feature generation, ML model optimization, deployment. and model monitoring. From the business side, Sensible ML enables organizations with several advantages including but not limited to:

• Automatically create thousands of daily and/or weekly demand planning ML forecasts with business intuition
• Reduce forecast bias with ML scenarios across reports, visualizations, forms and dashboards
• Unify with driver-based sales, material costs inventory, and labor plans across the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow forecasts
• Monitor and re-train ML models to enable continuous forecasting & scenario analysis
• Drill-back and back testing capabilities create transparency, trust and confidence in demand forecasts
   

“To keep up with these market dynamics, we see the role of finance continuing to evolve from a historical focus on close, reporting and static planning and expands beyond finance into more granular operational planning.  Powered with AutoAI and ML through Azure, we see a massive opportunity to help organizations accelerate this transformation and respond to the rapid pace of change,” says Shea. 

This includes but is not limited to businesses partnering with teams across sales, supply chain and human resources with a focus on delivering daily and weekly predictive insights to enable collaboration and help the organization drive financial and operational performance ahead of the traditional 30-day month end reporting cycle. 

“The whole point of technology is to actually use it, but businesses work around it all the time,” says Stern. “So, we’re creating an on-ramp, regardless of the industry they’re in, to continually grow the processes they had. And as they do that, they can just continue to replace legacy solutions, attack new use cases and focus on driving performance with OneStream.”