Herbalife

The Challenge

Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, Herbalife Nutrition operates in ninety countries and had multiple legacy CPM products in place including Oracle Hyperion (HFM), Planning, FDM, Essbase and EPMA. Managing data across several applications, the Company had a very manual Excel-based process for modeling and reporting. “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.

These legacy systems were limited by dimensionality which hindered the Company’s ability to report on project-level detail. It was time for the Company to make a choice—take on a major upgrade, move to the cloud, or start looking at alternative solutions.

Seeking to learn more about Oracle’s product roadmap, Herbalife Nutrition was ready to explore the market. OneStream™ was ultimately selected because it best complimented the Company’s system requirements to have all solutions in one product.
 
 

Implementing a Unified CPM Platform

The first phase of implementation included global consolidations for 80 markets, global expense planning, and people planning with direct integration with their Oracle Fusion HCM system. With 600 accounting and FP&A users globally, Herbalife Nutrition went live with 2.5 years of data conversion in just 10 months in a complete “rip and replace” of Hyperion Planning, Essbase and HFM.

Three months later, they went live with a Transfer Profit solution and today they are using People Planning, Parcel Service, and Diagnostics 123 solutions from the MarketPlace. “People Planning added more flexibility with the way we calculate compensation. Integrating directly with our HR system gives us more control and accurate data,” said Neal Yeung, Director of Financial Systems FP&A at Herbalife Nutrition.
 
 

Transfer Profit Analysis

With 90+ entities and 30+ currencies, Herbalife Nutrition manages a high volume of intercompany sales activity. As such, they are uniquely using OneStream as a solution to calculate the transfer profit in ending inventory, prepare the monthly elimination journal entry and assess the FX impact to cost of sales (calculation based on estimated quantities sold in the month).

“OneStream helps me to perform a very complicated calculation.” 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 and prepare our monthly elimination entries. Further, various reports are available in OneStream for the users to review the month to month fluctuation at item level by entity.”
 
 

Process Improvements and More

With OneStream, everything is now in one place for analysis. Cash flow reporting is automated, and the end users have access to reporting and analysis tools including the Excel add-in, dashboards and Cube Views. Financial statement analysis that was previously done in SharePoint is now also done in OneStream. Herbalife Nutrition is also leveraging Guided Workflow approvals to handle statement analysis forms, which are now easier to update, comment and track.

On the FP&A side, the company is using a driver-based rolling forecast to seed next year’s budget by forecasting revenue and expenses. “Our new planning process using workflows helped to streamline how data was entered and calculated and to provide results quicker, with more transparency,” said Yeung. “We are relying less on manual processes with direct integration of HR data. We’re now able to go back to the source and consolidate information much quicker. Comparing data across multiple forecasts and translating at different FX rates without a waiting period, has definitely improved our efficiencies.”

OneStream provides users the ability to see project code results for revenue and costs – which they didn’t have before in HFM. Now end users have more confidence in the data and are spending less time reconciling. This allows the company’s IT team to concentrate on adding value, rather than troubleshooting issues. “From an IT side, the month-end close is much smoother,” said Gaddam. “The reliability of integrations is better, the system availability is higher, and we are no longer experiencing data loss.”
 
 

Future Plans

Herbalife Nutrition continues to explore the OneStrean MarketPlace™, including the Account Reconciliations solution. “We’re really excited about the new capabilities in the latest OneStream release and look forward to upgrading soon,” said Yeung. “The new BI capabilities I’ve seen at the presentations at OneStream’s Splash Conference will help us greatly in this next phase. Building out dashboards—the visualizations—is something we want that we haven’t had in the past.”
 
 

About the Implementation Partner

Perficient is the leading digital transformation consulting firm serving Global 2000® and enterprise customers throughout North America. With unparalleled information technology, management consulting, and creative capabilities, Perficient and its Perficient Digital agency deliver vision, execution, and value with outstanding digital experience, business  optimization, and industry solutions. Traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, Perficient is a member of the Russell 2000 index and the S&P SmallCap 600 index. For more information, visit Perficient.com.
 
 

About OneStream™ Software

OneStream Software 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, extensible solution. We empower the enterprise with financial and operational insights to support faster and more informed decision-making. All in a cloud platform designed to continually evolve and scale with your organization.

OneStream’s Intelligent Finance platform can easily be extended with over 50 solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace. These downloadable solutions are fully battle-tested and optimized for the OneStream platform. They allow customers to easily extend the value of their investment to meet the changing needs of finance and operations.

For more information, please visit OneStream Software https://www.onestream.com or on Twitter @OneStream_Soft.
 
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