Huisman

About Huisman

Huisman is a leading designer and manufacturer of innovative technical solutions to the world’s leading companies in the renewables, oil & gas, naval, civil and entertainment industries. Founded in 1929, Huisman is a worldwide operating company with its head office based in Schiedam, the Netherlands, and with several production locations and sales, service and engineering offices across the world. Its product range can be subdivided into six main categories: Cranes, Pipelay Equipment, Drilling Equipment, Winches, Vessel Designs and Special Projects. Products vary from stand-alone components to highly engineered integrated systems, from concept to installation and lifetime support. For more information, please visit HuismanEquipment.com.

The Challenge

Headquartered in Schiedam, the Netherlands, Huisman Equipment serves oil and gas, renewables, leisure and civil industries worldwide. Geographically dispersed, Huisman was using separate applications across locations for financial consolidation and reporting. Project reporting was done in Excel®, with their main office using a Dutch-built ERP system for project registrations and capital expenditures. Subsidiaries in China and the Czech Republic used local ERP systems and smaller service stations across Singapore and North America were Excel®-based environments.

Huisman has grown rapidly over the last 10 years and needed a better way to understand business trends. “Our scattered landscape of applications was the main driver to get a solution in place,” said Daniel Wabeke, Senior Group Controller at Huisman. “We had issues with global reporting and mismatched data. We struggled to report on projects and needed to standardize information across locations.” With contracts as large as 50M euro, everything from contractor to delivery location data and more needed to live together to allow management to accurately report contracts in full.

The Selection Process

Although Huisman considered various options, after receiving guidance from a trusted consultant, they landed on OneStream™ Software. The flexible, yet unified architecture of OneStream was a major deciding factor. Huisman trusted that OneStream was the right choice because of the solution’s favorable signals in the market. “We decided on OneStream because we thought it was best for the business,” said Arjan van Ast, Group Controller at Huisman. “As the first adopter of OneStream in the Netherlands, we took a chance and it was a good one. The flexibility of OneStream would allow us to connect the full-system landscapes across locations to create harmony for group standards. This was key because we would no longer need to move data between fragmented systems.”

Implementing a Modern CPM Platform

Huisman began their OneStream implementation in September 2018 with a goal of going live in time for statutory reporting in January. “We wanted to get OneStream going as soon as possible, so we replicated our Excel environment as a quick fix,” said Wabeke. “But later, we really started digging into the power of the platform. We started to understand OneStream better and revamped our application with a focus on getting projects in scope.”

By using OneStream to organize the data in a standardized and uniform way, it exposed many issues within Huisman from consolidated project figures to financial results. “In the past year, we have refined the OneStream solution to collect and organize the data in the right way,” said Joost van Kooten, Project Controller at Huisman. “We wanted to be able to see what was going on in projects and how we should transform that information to finance. We started with projects then began balancing project reporting with financial reporting. By December, we had it up and running for the audits of the financials.”

The OneStream Cloud

Huisman’s choice to deploy OneStream Cloud provided a quick implementation via Microsoft Azure®, and their experience with the OneStream help desk has been very positive. Huisman has benefitted from local support in the Netherlands, as their use case continues to get broader. Today Huisman has 100 line-of-business users, and another 25 in corporate finance.

OneStream is capturing different levels of information across locations, which has dramatically streamlined project and contract management. Huisman has hundreds of contracts that are broken out into as many as 30 sub-contracts across 60 accounts, multiple locations and currencies. One contract must be passed around internally through the locations, and OneStream fits this information together in one unified view. This allows users to drill from summary information on a project, into employee detail, to better manage the project lifecycle from proposal to delivery. The users can make their own analysis by slicing and dicing the data for their own point of view. Whether globally or country-specific country, all contract data is in place.

Benefits Achieved

With 90% of their project data in OneStream, Huisman is seamlessly reconciling across systems and locations. The company is also forecasting contracts based on detailed data collected across projects.

“Before OneStream, we had to dig into project data in all the individual ERP systems,” said van Kooten. “OneStream helps make our data auditable and extendable. It enables us to understand our business and create standardized processes within a global system. We trust the data in OneStream, so there are no disagreements about accuracy. We can focus on the contract, not fixing the data.”

Best of all, Huisman can see the full capacity of the business—not only financial data. In the past it was very difficult for Huisman to get operational expenditure data in place, but now they are forecasting operational expenses, revenue and margins by project for a complete view of the forecast of the company. Huisman is tracking financial data, as well as employee hours and rates by contract in OneStream. Users can see the capacity utilization by project and sub-project to support capacity planning. With 50+ reports, Huisman has accelerated from monthly to weekly—and soon daily—tracking of hours for 600 employees across projects.

“OneStream has created confidence in our contracts,” said Wabeke. “There are less surprises in our financial data. We can easily see the results over time for comparison purposes, so we can answer any questions quickly.”

About the Implementation Partner

Finext has been implementing leading Performance Management solutions at more than 150 organizations in the Netherlands and abroad for almost 20 years. The performance management team consists of 100 experienced, skilled and certified EPM professionals. This makes Finext the largest independent performance management specialist in the Netherlands. With knowledge of information architecture, advice and implementation, infrastructure and management, they realize good management, reliable figures, fast reports and clear insights from stable systems with their customers. For more information, visit Finext.nl/en.

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.