Reunert Modernizes Finance by Moving from SAP BPC to OneStream

As global enterprises grow and evolve, their financial reporting and planning requirements become more advanced and they often outgrow their legacy corporate performance management (CPM) applications.  Integrating data from multiple GL/ERP systems, managing complex intercompany relationships, and reporting results to stakeholders often requires manual workarounds and reliance on Excel spreadsheets to fill gaps in the CPM applications.

This was the case at Reunert Limited, one of the leading communications equipment suppliers in South Africa.  With a 130-year history, Reunert had grown organically and via acquisitions into a global enterprise with over 6,600 employees and a variety of GL/ERP systems running at various subsidiaries.  To consolidate and report financial results from multiple systems, the group finance function was using an older version of SAP BPC that hadn’t been upgraded since 2008.

The finance team was heavily dependent on Excel as a front-end to SAP BPC for financial and management reporting. With limited sub-consolidation and reporting capabilities, SAP BPC was becoming costly to maintain and could not address changing business needs without a major upgrade/replacement, which was estimated to cost over $4M USD and 3 years to implement for financial consolidation, reporting and budgeting.  It was time to look at viable alternatives.

Making the Move to OneStream

The finance team issued a formal RFP to six vendors including OneStream.  OneStream was eventually selected based on its pre-built functionality and the team’s ability to answer and demonstrate solutions to Reunert’s challenges. But above all, Reunert was particularly impressed with the quality and satisfaction levels of OneStream’s customer references.

Reunert performed a staged deployment of OneStream starting with financial consolidation and reporting, then extending into budgeting and forecasting. The consolidation solution in OneStream spans 80 legal entities and six currencies, with 20 consolidated reporting entities including geographic, subsidiary, segment and group consolidations.

Since actuals and budget are all supported by a unified platform, the annual budget incorporates intercompany eliminations to ensure 100% accuracy. The application also includes cash flow forecasting, based on movements in bank balances.  The solution is deployed to 128 users across Group Finance and operations in Zambia, Sweden, the USA, and Australia.

Reaping the Benefits of a Modern, Unified Platform

The implementation of OneStream has provided many benefits to Reunert.  According to Christian Fourie, Group Management Accountant, “The big benefit to us is the application was off the shelf, so it was relatively easy to deploy. OneStream support has been great, quickly resolving any issues we encountered.”

“The whole solution is great. We can do quality consolidations, and it’s very easy getting information out of the system,” said Fourie. “Intercompany eliminations that were nearly impossible to perform and only done once per year in SAP BPC—are now done monthly and in one day with OneStream. Group consolidation that used to take 12 working days in SAP BPC is now done by the seventh working day with OneStream. This enables the finance team to deliver information to group executives well in advance of the monthly management meetings.”

Learn More

To learn more about how Reunert Limited made the leap from SAP BPC to OneStream, read the full case study on our web site.  And feel free to contact OneStream if your company is looking for a proven alternative to SAP BPC, and other legacy applications.