Huisman Moves from Away from Excel to Increase Project Performance Management

A revolutionary product is launched into the market. Are you eager to test it out, or do you wait until it has been widely accepted by society? There are many benefits to jumping on board early, especially when adopting technology. Trendsetting organizations can position themselves at the forefront of a major market movement and evolution. As they say, the early bird gets the worm.

With an eye on innovation, Huisman was willing to adopt new technology for their finance transformation journey which began back in 2018. As one of the first adopters of OneStream in the Netherlands, Huisman took a chance, and it was a good one. Huisman saw the appeal and potential of OneStream because the company’s vision aligned with their own needs and goals. Since then, OneStream has been named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for Cloud Financial Close and Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) markets, and recently received a 100% recommendation score in the BARC Planning Survey 21.

Read on to learn about Huisman’s OneStream journey and the successes they have seen by replacing Excel with an intelligent finance platform.

Scattered Landscape of Applications

Founded in 1929, Huisman Equipment is a worldwide operating company with its head office based in Schiedam, the Netherlands. Huisman designs and manufactures heavy construction equipment for the world’s leading companies in the renewable energy, oil and gas, civil, naval and entertainment markets. Huisman’s products range from cranes, pipelay equipment, drilling equipment and winches, to vessel designs and specials. Huisman employs approximately 2,500 people and has an annual turnover of €600M.

With locations around the world, Huisman had 10 regional offices using different local finance systems and Excel for financial consolidation and project reporting. Month-end and quarterly closing numbers would take up to a month to complete, while year-end reporting would take 3-4 months. There was no standard reporting pack for all departments and locations, which led to mismatched data that made reporting difficult.

From Spreadsheets to an Intelligent Finance Platform

Huisman embarked on a digital transformation to improve transparency across the organization and optimize business performance. This included a heavy focus on improving financial consolidation, reporting and project performance management. Although an unknown name in the Netherlands region at the time, OneStream’s cloud platform was selected because of its ability to streamline financial reporting but also support more operational and project performance management. Huisman strongly believed that OneStream would provide confidence in their contracts and less uncertainty in financial data.

Phase 1a of the OneStream implementation focused on project administration for 50 reporting entities. This included processing actuals, sales budgets, revised budgets, and forecasts in OneStream with detailed information about hours and costs per project. Managing intercompany activity is streamlined with project rate currency translations happening in OneStream. Phase 1b focused on implementing the financial consolidation model with P&L, balance sheet, cashflow and equity pick-up produced in OneStream. Future phases will include fiscal reporting, daily cash information, planning and budgeting, and more.

Benefits of Switching to OneStream

OneStream was flexible enough to connect system landscapes across locations, eliminating the need to move data between fragmented systems and providing Huisman with better insight into project performance across each entity and portfolio. By balancing project reporting with financial reporting, Huisman has gained visibility into project performance with more detailed financial data.

With 90% of their project data in OneStream, Huisman is seamlessly reconciling across systems and locations. OneStream is capturing different levels of information across locations, which has dramatically streamlined project and contract management. Users can drill down from summary information on a project, then into employee detail, to better manage the project lifecycle from proposal to delivery. Users can make their own analysis by slicing and dicing the data for their own point of view.

With 50+ reports, Huisman has accelerated from monthly to daily tracking of hours for 600 employees across projects. They now have detailed standard reporting packs for project managers, department heads and the board to review.

Learn More

To learn more about Huisman’s unique OneStream journey, we invite you to read their Customer Success Story. And if your organization is ready to ditch spreadsheets and start your digital transformation journey, contact OneStream today!