The Art of the Possible – Advanced Visualization and Analytics with OneStream

Modern finance is now.   While organizations are at varying stages of the innovation journey, the finance transformation story is well known.

Finance is no longer a backward-focused, compliance-only function or gatekeeper of data.  Instead, modern finance teams are tightly integrated with front-line management to help sales, marketing and operational leaders ask, analyze and answer important questions for the business including:

• Which product lines, customers segments or distribution channels are most profitable?
• What are return on equity, working capital and debt to equity metrics for key business units?
• What are latest project plans for strategic governance initiatives?

With the growing volumes of information available across today’s global enterprises, Finance is no longer a gatekeeper of data.  Rather, modern finance departments are often responsible for empowering managers with timely, accurate data and solutions that make it easy for global business users to consume, draw insights and understand the “business story” behind the numbers.

Empowering Managers To Be More Than Gatekeepers Through OneStream

OneStream Software provides a revolutionary, SmartCPM^TM platform which unifies and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics and financial data quality for sophisticated organizations.

The OneStream XF platform also includes powerful dashboards and data visualization capabilities to bring the data to life with click-through ready charts, graphs and reports – empowering finance and business partners to draw rapid insights and enable important decision analysis.

B-EYE Solutions has leveraged the power of OneStream to build and deploy advanced data visualizations for clients to meet a broad range of business requirements. Because of OneStream’s unique Extensible Dimensionality® and Relational Blending capabilities, clients can integrate and capture a great deal of operational data and financial data all within a single application.  This approach provides valuable insights into revenue, margin, and product volume with full linkage to order fulfillment information, productivity of sales representatives, and/or other transactional metrics.

User Driven Reporting with B-EYE “User Experience & Reporting Framework for OneStream XF (UXF)”

The “User Experience & Reporting Framework for OneStream XF (UXF)” is a specialized solution that allows clients to generate pixel-perfect dashboards and reports for management reports and board presentations. Developed by OneStream Platinum Partner B-EYE and harnessing OneStream’s unified platform, UXF gives organizations a single view of financial and operating results. Figure 1 below shows an example of a client project to build a KPI dashboard package that includes interactive, drill-through ability between various financial and operating insights – such as customer and employee metrics.

Figure 1: Client growth KPI dashboard built on B-EYE User Experience & Reporting Framework for OneStream XF (UXF)

Shopping Cart in UXF

UXF comes with a “Shopping Cart” feature that links to any dashboard and report, allowing users to create personal report books in real-time.

Users can add the desired dashboard or report to their personal shopping cart or edit an existing dashboard with different point of views.  A full report version of the dashboard is then added to the shopping cart.

Once complete, users can check out the shopping cart where their reports are combined into a personal report book and placed in the user’s print quality personal bookshelf.

The Shopping Cart function works across all areas of the OneStream XF application and with B-EYE’s expertise, OneStream dashboards can be created across industries such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing and consumer products. Figure 2 below illustrates a dashboard using the UXF toolbar to provide a quick access to print a dashboard and work with the shopping cart and the bookshelf.

Figure 2: Dashboard using the toolbar from the B-EYE User Experience & Reporting Framework for OneStream XF (UXF)

Figure 3 illustrates the “landing page” dashboard utilizing the power of relational blended data by combining financial data, operational data and non-financial data in one view.

With OneStream’s Relational Blending feature, business users can see both financial and operational metrics related to product and/or channel performance versus budget and forecasts with real-time drill through capability to understand the “why” behind the numbers. By storing transaction data relationally, Relational Blending allows certain operational data to live where it belongs vs. including everything within the financial cube – maximizing the customer experience and dashboard performance.

Figure 3: “Landing Page” dashboard example

In addition to operational dashboards, visualization can be a powerful method to standardize and automate strategy management and reporting.  With OneStream, building a data model for strategy management and dashboards for visualizing can be very powerful to drive project focus.  KPIs can be added in real-time as the actual, budget and forecast data becomes available, giving users maximum flexibility to edit reports based on what is important for their business.

Strategy reports are also interactive, with capability to filter and pivot dimensions and drill- through the data to understand business drivers and help leaders uncover the business story and understand underlying assumptions.

Figure 4: B-EYE Strategy Management solution.

Traditional BI Tools vs. OneStream XF

While OneStream offers the ability to export data out of the platform into a data warehouse for access by standalone or traditional BI tools such as Tableau, Qlik or SAP BW – many organizations have leveraged OneStream to eliminate 3^rd party BI tools.  There are several benefits from this, which include:

• Reduce license costs on 3^rd party tools
• Eliminate data latency associated with moving data between systems and get real-time data access to live data in OneStream
• Only maintain one security model, with all users residing in the same platform
• Ability to integrate and access financial and operational information in OneStream’s single, unified platform

B-EYE Solutions is encouraging customers to think bigger and leverage the extensive dashboards and visualization capabilities of OneStream.  Instead of fragmented financial and operational data across departments which often use a variety of BI tools – a better approach is to leverage a scalable platform to unify financial and operational data and deliver real-time insights to executives and managers across the enterprise using a single solution.

“When evaluating client needs and developing enterprise solutions to transform finance, the only real choice for clients is OneStream. Not only have we replicated the functionality of existing BI tools, but we have also added function-forward capabilities and higher return on investment by leveraging a single platform.” Says Martin Hausle Ebbesen Business Analytics Consultant at B-EYE.

Benefits Delivered

Leveraging the OneStream platform to build and deploy stunning business intelligence dashboards gives the C-suite, Finance, and business partners a one-stop shop not only to manage the business but also to increase productivity within the back office.  Creating board books and management reporting is made simple. With push-button integration to Microsoft Office®, email notifications and mobile-ready reporting – users consume information in the manner they are most comfortable with.  Other benefits of the OneStream platform include:

•  Enable management with real-time access to financial and operating results all in one unified
• Eliminate data latency from moving data between applications
• Extensible Dimensionality® enables business units to report and plan at a lower level of granularity without impacting corporate standards
• Relational Blending allows relational and cube data to coexist in a single application, with the ability to report and drill back to the details
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership by eliminating 3^rd party tools

“It is truly exciting to bring modern, best of breed innovation with the technical ability and experience to execute.  OneStream will be the foundation for our clients continued finance transformation,” says Lars Ring from B-EYE.

Learn More

To learn about the OneStream XF platform and B-eye solutions, please visit our web site and check out a replay of our recent webinar: The Art of the Possible – Advanced Visualization and Analytics with OneStream featuring OneStream CRO Craig Colby and Jesper Kamstrup, Managing Partner from B-EYE Solutions.