Cleaver Brooks

HOW A FINANCE TEAM TOOK FULL CONTROL OF FINANCIAL REPORTING WITH ONESTREAM

Like MindStream, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) often meets where Finance and IT collide. In some cases, Finance teams are seeking an autonomous solution to avoid crossfunctional challenges of managing software, while still managing the business. When Cleaver-Brooks sought a more dynamic reporting process, they discovered this could be achieved with the benefit of Finance autonomy when we helped them implement OneStream XF . This powerful platform provided the company the speed, ease, and adaptability it required to unify its financial reporting, consolidation, and planning across the enterprise.

THE CHALLENGE: LEGACIES, DISPARITIES, AND LACK OF AGILITY

For the complex world of industrial manufacturing, Cleaver-Brooks needed insight into its divisions' actuals sooner, to accelerate the planning process at the corporate level. In the business units, divisional controllers were not able to efficiently insert critical data, such as labor and production drivers, into the system. In corporate, with Consolidations done primarily in Excel, reporting times were upwards of an hour. Planning tools lacked dynamic reporting, creating risks for inaccuracies in budgets and forecasts, which affected critical labor and capacity planning for the manufacturing business. In addition, drill-back into transactional data was becoming increasingly unwieldy. The organization asked: "Can we do this better, faster?"

THE SOLUTION: FINANCE PLANNING TRANSFORMATION WITH THE ONESTREAM

MindStream did a system assessment, and determined the answer was "Yes!" We discovered the following key requirements for their future EPM process and software:

• Ease of use, maintenance, and training
• Minimal IT support required
• Real-time, on-the-fly analysis
• Data integration with third-party systems
• Ease of integration of company acquisitions

With these in mind, OneStream XF was chosen as the platform that would transform Cleaver-Brooks' Finance processes. The most notable benefit was its ability to be maintained by Finance with minimal reliance on IT, an important driver of the project. The other motivator was OneStream's ability to provide a single tool for consolidations and planning. OneStream was able to replace both a manual consolidations process and similarly outdated analytic and reporting systems for planning.

In addition, OneStream's XF MarketPlace provided the company with the flexibility to tailor the software to the organization's planning needs as they arise. For example, in their business, it is valuable to plan for manufacturing absorption and labor variances. OneStream provided a tool to do the calculations automatically. Cleaver-Brooks simply downloaded and incorporated OneStream's People Planning solution from the XF MarketPlace.

With that, plant controllers are able to enter Labor and Production drivers directly, and the organization is able to budget headcount and payroll costs quickly, accurately planning for capacity based on anticipated production. Cleaver-Brooks also involved MindStream as an implementation partner. With OneStream in the lead, MindStream was involved from inception to project planning, design, build, testing, and final rollout.

THE RESULTS: AUTONOMOUS, STREAMLINED, ADAPTABLE

Autonomy, coupled with the ability to tailor the single-platform OneStream solution, gave corporate and the business units the critical ability to control their individual consolidation, reporting, analysis, and close processes. The corporate reporting process is not only easier, but significantly faster. What once took 45 minutes to an hour to complete is now reduced to minutes. With OneStream as the engine, we were able to help our client implement a system that has an adaptability to meet the dynamically changing needs of Finance teams, one that is able to yield continuing positive return on their enterprise performance management investment.

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