After 10 Years of Hyperion, Lucy Group Takes Charge with OneStream

Having a clear financial picture of your company is critical for success. Without visibility into data, and the processes that led to that data, there is no financial control. International business group, Lucy Group Ltd, was juggling multiple financial management systems that required substantial manual effort for little return. That was, until they replaced Oracle Hyperion Enterprise with OneStream XF. Read on to learn how OneStream XF provided insight into financial reporting that enabled Lucy Group to move forward with confidence.

Strong Heritage with a Bright Future

Lucy Group Ltd is a privately-owned, international group headquartered in Oxford, England with origins dating back more than 200 years. Since then, Lucy Group has evolved with operating businesses across four sectors: Lucy Castings, Lucy Controls, Lucy Electric and Lucy Real Estate. Lucy Group now employs over 1,400 people across offices and factories in 10 regions and trades in over 60 countries.

Modernizing Financial and Management Reporting

For over 10 years, Lucy Group had been using Oracle Hyperion Enterprise for financial consolidations, budgeting and planning. However, the legacy product was not agile enough to keep up with management’s demands for greater insight. Lucy Group had no visibility into the financial breakdown of business segments, as their legacy system wedged individual product groups into larger entity structures. Lucy Group was stuck having to manually integrate data across multiple GL and ERP applications to gain a better understanding of individual unit information.

A Unified Platform for Lucy Group

The high cost and lengthy system overhaul required for a Hyperion upgrade led Lucy Group to look for a replacement. OneStream Software offered the extended dimensionality they were looking for, within a single Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution. As one unified platform, OneStream XF eliminates the risk and complexity of data integration, validation and reconciliation between multiple applications. OneStream accommodated Lucy Group’s need to easily access detailed financial information from each business unit, product group and cost center.

The Path to Increased Visibility

Lucy Group leverages guided workflow functionality in OneStream XF to standardize processes across business units. Now the group finance team can see exactly how far each user is within a process. Users load their data directly into OneStream for review and workflow lock notifications tell management when to take over and process the data. The date-stamped workflows include details of user actions, which has provided Lucy Group with a much-improved audit trail. Automatic notifications alert Lucy Group team members to upcoming deadlines and enables users to provide commentary on task status, keeping management well-informed and end users accountable.

Lucy Group has since extended their CPM platform with Guided Reporting from OneStream’s XF MarketPlace. This solution provides business users with one place to view all reports with additional flexibility to mix and match rows and column sets to create new reports.

Benefits of a Global CPM Platform

For Lucy Group, OneStream delivers a flexible consolidation and reporting engine that ensures data quality and confidence with the ability to drill down to source data through cube views. “OneStream XF has taken a great deal of pressure and workload off group finance, where previously we would have to do a lot of checking the data,” said Guy Hill, Group Reporting Manager of Lucy Group. “The individual users can do it all themselves now, which is obviously a huge benefit to any organization.”

Lucy Group is thrilled to have a CPM platform that is completely owned by the finance team. Best of all, a recent upgrade took just a matter of hours – versus days with their previous application. Future phases for Lucy Group include replacing Hyperion Strategic Finance for budgeting and planning to help corporate finance complete long-term deal modeling with improved visibility into cash flow.

Read the complete Lucy Group case study today and contact OneStream to learn how you can modernize your finance department with a unified CPM platform.