Replacing Hyperion and Leveraging SAP Investments at Endo International

Legacy ERP, data warehouse and fragmented corporate performance management (CPM) applications can hinder the effectiveness of finance teams. Instead of focusing on the business – many finance staff spend nights and weekends managing multiple systems, moving and reconciling data, and trying to create meaningful management reports.

Dealing with this challenge was the focus of a recent OneStream webinar featuring our customer Endo International, which replaced several Oracle Hyperion products and Host Analytics with a single instance of OneStream’s unified CPM platform.  During the webinar Nicole Bruno, Financial Systems Manager at Endo discussed how the company modernized and simplified their CPM system landscape with OneStream, integrated directly with their SAP HANA-based data warehouse, and streamlined their financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, planning and analysis processes.

Here are some of the highlights from the webinar.

Legacy CPM Environment at Endo

Endo International is a highly focused generics and specialty branded pharmaceutical company delivering quality medicines to patients in need through excellence in development, manufacturing and commercialization. Endo has global headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and U.S. headquarters in Malvern, PA.

Endo was using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) for financial consolidation and reporting and three instances of Hyperion Planning for planning and forecasting.  They were also using Oracle FDM, Essbase, DRM and DRG as well as Host Analytics at one division.

HFM was not being used to its full extent. Because of the fragmented set up of products being used, the company had different charts of accounts for actuals vs. forecast, which made it difficult to compare results at period-end.  There were lots of reconciliation issues and different levels of detail across scenarios, which created challenges in reporting.

As a result, the Finance team at Endo was under stress, performing a lot of manual work, and had challenges meeting deadlines.  In addition, the reporting and planning processes were very centralized at HQ, and communications with remote locations caused further delays.  Given Oracle’s lack of investment in the Hyperion products, the Endo Finance team started looking at alternatives.

OneStream to the Rescue

The Endo team evaluated several solutions, including Oracle’s Cloud EPM products, SAP BPC, and OneStream.  One of the Finance executives had implemented OneStream at a prior company and had a very positive experience.    Based on this prior experience, its unified architecture, ease of use, flexibility, and limited IT support required – Endo selected OneStream Software.

The team also decided to implement the OneStream XF Cloud  solution, since this would reduce their IT support requirements.  Endo did a “big bang” implementation of OneStream for financial consolidation, reporting, annual budgeting, and quarterly forecasting and went live in November 2017.  This “big bang” approach replaced all their Oracle Hyperion products, and Host Analytics.

The key to being able to replace multiple legacy Hyperion applications with a single instance of OneStream was the chart of accounts redesign that Endo performed, combined with leveraging OneStream’s Extensible Dimensionality®.  This allowed Endo to accommodate different levels of detail in the chart of accounts and data coming from their SAP and JDE ERP systems. It also allowed them to extend the Product dimension in OneStream to accommodate reporting on Profit Centers from SAP and Product Business Units from their JDE system.

The Benefits of a Unified Platform

Having a unified platform for all their financial consolidation, reporting, planning and analysis processes has yielded many benefits for Endo.

• System Administration – one system to learn and use, streamlined data loading through guided workflows and templates for users, direct connect with drill-back to their SAP BI HANA warehouse. More time for real analysis instead of reconciling systems.
• Accounting/Financial Reporting – common chart of accounts makes reporting and analysis easier, improved price/volume analysis, with drill-through to transactional details
• Financial Planning & Analysis – one system with detail at the ERP level that is consistent with actuals, faster data consolidations, faster ad hoc analysis, automated working capital and faster/better management reporting through executive dashboards

Since going live with OneStream, Endo has implemented master data change approvals via the RequestIt solution from OneStream partner Finit, and they are now extending their investment by rolling out the Account Reconciliations solution from the OneStream XF MarketPlace.

To learn more, watch the replay of the webinar and feel free to contact OneStream if you are ready to modernize finance and leave your legacy systems behind.