Valeo Foods is Living the Sweet Life with OneStream

Let’s face it. Excel® spreadsheets were not designed to address the complex financial consolidation and reporting requirements of global enterprises. When growing internationally, each new entity in a different country adds an additional currency to translate into the corporate reporting currency. There may also be multiple legal entities, ERP-systems and local reporting requirements under different accounting standards. Consolidating this data with Excel can get messy very quickly as spreadsheets are manually shared and edited by multiple people.

As Valeo Foods quickly discovered, Excel is not the right application for financial close and consolidation in growing, global companies. Read on to learn how implementing a world-class corporate performance management (CPM) solution shortened their close process with automated calculations and more accurate results.

Producing the Foods People Love to Eat
Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Valeo Foods is one of Europe’s fastest growing consumer foods producers with a portfolio of 68 international brands. Since its formation in 2010, Valeo Foods has enjoyed rapid expansion geographically, successfully acquired 12 leading food businesses. Valeo Foods has over 715 international retail partners and generates over €870 million in annual sales across 92 global markets.

Valeo Loses Its Appetite for Excel
As a leading European food producer, Valeo Foods takes its responsibilities to consumers, suppliers and communities very seriously. However internally their Finance group was struggling. The organization had grown significantly through several acquisitions yet was still using Excel spreadsheets for monthly financial close and consolidation processes. Each operating entity used a different GL/ERP system, adding to the challenge of managing fragmented data. Spreadsheets holding sensitive financial results were emailed to Group Finance, where foreign currency translations and consolidations were done manually in Excel.

As each financial year passed, the Excel consolidation model continued to get larger, with management and statutory reporting becoming increasingly complex and prone to error. With too much time and manual effort spent collecting data, Valeo Foods decided to look for a modern CPM solution.

A Taste of Modern CPM
Valeo Foods started the search for a sustainable solution that would enable more efficient financial close and consolidation processes. First and foremost, they needed to safeguard the distribution of financial reports across geographic regions. They also wanted a modern, scalable solution to support future growth as Valeo Foods continues to acquire companies.

Valeo Foods evaluated several options but ultimately selected OneStream Software for their CPM needs. OneStream had the most positive reviews from global research firms and customers and the platform’s capabilities far outpaced competing vendor products.

OneStream XF Feeds Valeo’s Needs
The first phase of the OneStream XF implementation encompassed the financial close and consolidation process and since going live, Valeo Foods has benefitted from increased reporting transparency and analysis. Through a configured “Cross Selling Channel” with built-in validations, local entities can now see intercompany results using internal transfer pricing functionality in the OneStream XF SmartCPM™ platform. Intercompany differences are now identified instantly and resolved easily at local entity level.

As a result of the implementation, Valeo Foods has realized significant improvements in both management and financial reporting. The monthly close process is faster by three to four days and more efficient with the elimination of over 30 Excel spreadsheets. Data quality has significantly improved, and the Finance Group can rest-assured that financial information is securely stored within a single platform.

What’s Next for Valeo Foods?
With a newly defined plug-and-play approach to onboarding acquired companies and their financial systems, OneStream has provided the Finance team the opportunity to spend additional time on analysis and less on preparing reports. In the next implementation phase, Valeo Foods will have KPI framework defined with non-financial data and Business Intelligence reporting added into the application. The final phase will see driver-based forecasting deployed with OneStream.

Learn More
Could your finance organization benefit from a unified CPM platform for analyzing data across global locations? Read the Valeo Foods success story to learn more or register for our upcoming customer success webinar featuring Valeo Foods.