OneStream Adds Governed Analytics Enabling Users to Analyze Without Compromise

While many organizations are well down the path of finance transformation, the role of the CFO and Finance leaders continues to expand. In addition to traditional financial responsibility and accountability, the finance team is now called upon to act as a strategic advisor to business leaders. The finance organization’s historical credibility in controlling financial data, metrics, analysis and reporting gives it a unique voice of authority and trust among business leaders. By extending that credibility and confidence beyond financial results to include operational insights, the finance organization can establish itself as the go-to business partner for operational and strategic business decisions.

According to Ventana Research’s 2019 Finance Benchmark study, 76% of finance leaders cite analytics as critical to performance management. But only 19% of organizations achieve the highest level of innovation to drive the business. Why is this?  Because traditional BI and analytics tools often force finance leaders to choose between control and flexibility and cannot support the complexity, diversity and pace of data needed for financial AND operational decision-making.

OneStream Introduces Built-In, Governed Analytics

OneStream’s reporting and analytics strategy is to enable finance and business users with the ability to quickly integrate, analyze, visualize, and draw insights across all aspects of their business within a single, unified platform. Our strategy is to provide easy access to ALL the data these users need for analysis, directly within OneStream so they can “analyze without compromise.”

In our Fall 2019 platform release (a.k.a. OneStream XF 5.2) OneStream extends the platform with new self-service dashboards and built-in governed analytics.  With this release we are providing customers an integrated analytic approach that’s Comprehensive, Controlled and Consumable.

Here’s a quick tour of some of the new capabilities in this release:

Analytic Blend: The OneStream XF platform now provides a unique “blend” of governed analytical capabilities ranging from Financial Consolidation – to Data Aggregation – to Transaction Analysis in one platform.  The ability to support all three types of data in one platform is ground-breaking.  OneStream intelligently brings together CPM, Financial Analytics, BI, Operational and other transaction-level data for comprehensive analysis and visualization directly within one application, using the same data integration and preparation, guided workflow, metadata and reporting tools that customers already understand.

Data Visualization/BI Dashboards: With new self-service, drag and drop, easy to build dashboards – OneStream is enabling users to quickly configure interactive dashboards that extends real-time access to trusted data in OneStream, and other data sources, to a much larger user community of business users and executive decision-makers.

Pivot Grid:  A new interactive Pivot Grid enables users to slice and dice large volumes of detailed data, apply filters and conditional formatting to quickly highlight key business trends – breaking free from the limitations of Excel spreadsheets.

So what are the benefits of these new capabilities to OneStream customers?  Well to start, instead of pushing financial data to a business intelligence (BI) platform or data warehouse, now you can bring all the supplemental data you need for comprehensive analysis into OneStream XF. This way you retain all financial intelligence, governance, workflow and the single trusted source of the financial truth that you have in OneStream and simply blend in additional data needed for comprehensive, controlled and easily consumable dashboards and analytics.

With these new capabilities, OneStream customers can now:

• Eliminate Fragmented Tools and Reduce TCO – leverage one platform for CPM/EPM, BI, Analytics and Visualization across finance, sales, HR and line of business operations.
• Integrate Financial and Operational Data – OneStream now supports the capture, mapping and loading of millions of rows of data from external sources (ERP, CRM, HCM, DW) for speed of thought reporting and analysis.
• Eliminate Data Latency and Replication – eliminate the need to export data from CPM applications to BI tools (e.g., Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, etc.) causing data latency and loss of control.
• Increase Speed to Value – promote self-service dashboard creation for finance users, line of business analysts and power users for super-fast, drag-and-drop ad hoc analysis against summarized financial results, or millions of rows of operational data. All this using familiar workflows, controls, reporting and analysis tools for broader user acceptance and adoption.
• Visualize with Transparency – enable complete transparency and audit trails from summary visualization down to detail transactions and sources of all data.

Here’s what industry analyst Howard Dresner had to say about the new capabilities OneStream is introducing with our Fall 2019 release:

“Our 2019 Wisdom of Crowds research reveals that the top 5 BI initiatives include reporting, dashboards, visualization, data integration, and end-user self-service, with an increased importance placed on collaboration and governance to create an environment where users can easily create and share insights in a managed and consistent fashion,” said  Howard Dresner, founder and Chief Research Officer, Dresner Advisory Services. “Finance and line of business users within larger enterprises are looking for these governance and analytics features to facilitate the broader adoption of BI and analytics throughout their organizations.”

OneStream customers and partners are also excited about the new capabilities.  Here’s what Rachel Murphy at Guardian Industries had to say:

“The new OneStream BI Dashboards will make it easy for finance and business analysts to quickly create interactive visualizations on key business metrics that our leaders can use to make decisions that drive profitable action.   Having this ability in our unified OneStream platform will reduce reporting latency and retain security and governance over critical business information.” Rachel Murphy, Manager – Financial Planning & Analysis, Guardian Glass

Learn More

To learn more about the new capabilities in OneStream’s Fall 2019 release, and the latest market trends in CPM and Analytics, watch the webinar replay titled:  Take Data-Driven Decision-Making to the Next Level with Governed Analytics.  And contact OneStream if you are ready to enable your users to “Analyze Without Compromise.”