Traxion

Grupo Traxión

Grupo Traxión, a leading company in the auto transport and logistics industry in Mexico, offers a unique and comprehensive solution of cargo and logistics auto transport and school and personnel transportation services. Through these two operating segments, it provides domestic and international ground self-transport services in a highly fragmented market. Through its diversified fleet of trucks and buses, as well as its rigorous maintenance and renovation programs, Grupo Traxión has the capacity to provide high quality services in the Mexican Republic and to coordinate continuous services to the United States. For more information, please visit Traxion.Global/Nosotros.

The Challenge

Headquartered in Mexico City, Grupo Traxión started through acquisitions of several logistics and transportation companies. These companies had their own ERPs, including SAP and Oracle systems, each with a different chart of accounts, philosophy of work and APIs. Grupo Traxión was using Excel® spreadsheets for financial consolidation and reporting, but inconsistencies in data collection from each entity created a long and inefficient month-end close process. There was a lot of pressure on the regional controllers who were responsible for using Excel® formulas to add balances for the spreadsheets of each entity and department.

In addition, senior management lacked visibility into the individual business segments, which limited their ability to perform detailed analysis and strategic decision-making. Grupo Traxión needed to strengthen internal controls over financial information with a unified platform for financial consolidation, internal and external reports, comparatives and analysis.

The Selection Process

With 32 entities, Grupo Traxión wanted a solution that could be easily maintained while simplifying the regional consolidation process for more accurate reporting. “Our vision was to deliver and analyze the information in a better way,” said Victor Ordaz, Corporate Controller Director, Grupo Traxión and sponsor of the project. “We needed to establish one way to control the information to make better informed decisions.”

Qlik View and Power BI did not meet their financial consolidation needs, and the Oracle and SAP EPM products were too complex, with difficult data integration capabilities. Outliers Consulting, a Silver Plus partner of OneStream™ based in Mexico City, showed Grupo Traxión how OneStream would meet its requirements, including the ability to integrate and map multiple data sources into a single chart of accounts. With an immense amount of positive feedback from analyst research companies, OneStream was ultimately selected after an in-depth demonstration.

Implementing a Modern CPM Platform

Phase 1 focused on financial close and consolidation, which was successfully implemented within a swift six-month period. The build included a multi-consolidation process for financial and management data. Data integrations are also in place between the data sources and OneStream’s Cloud platform, which enables Traxión’s 65 users to drillback to the transactions for deeper insights into financial data. “Now, we have a friendly option to include all the BI possibilities,” said Ordaz.

“OneStream provides us with more confidence in the consolidated financial results,” said Arturo Desmoctt, Financial information Director, Grupo Traxión. “Transitioning from Excel® to OneStream has been a huge transformation for Traxión. While we had difficulties sharing financial information before. Now OneStream is the single point of truth for all reporting with a graphical view of the information.”

Next, they will work on a design for Phase 2, which will involve collecting and combining non-financial and financial data to achieve a solution with analytics capabilities at an operational division level. At the end of Phase 2, the analysis will begin for extending OneStream to budgeting and forecasting. Currently, Grupo Traxión is loading budgets from Excel® into OneStream for reporting actuals vs. budget.

The OneStream Cloud

OneStream’s MarketPlace™ enables Grupo Traxion to save costs while adding value to their existing installation. The Guided Reporting solution provides users with an intuitive and easy-to-use viewing experience for monthly and quarterly reports. Grupo Traxión is also working with the Task Manager solution to help track and control the close and consolidation process. Executives are also interested in implementing the IFRS16 Lease Accounting solution from the MarketPlace soon.

“The support from Outliers has been excellent! And the Cloud is incredibly useful, especially in the current virus situation with people working from home,” said Desmoctt. “The individual companies can control their numbers, and we have certainty in the financial statements of the company. OneStream is helping to keep everyone productive, processes running and the business moving.”

With Excel® the close process was five days but has now been shortened to two to three days with OneStream. This gives Grupo Traxión the opportunity to spend more time reviewing and analyzing results rather than preparing reports.

Benefits Achieved

Grupo Traxión has achieved a significant improvement in the preparation of management reports and financial statements. The quality of reports in OneStream has been recognized by many stakeholders for its transparency and analytical capacity. Grupo Traxión now has all the relevant details of the financial statements at the individual entity level with full transparency between corporate and the individual entities.

“The drill-down functionality provides us with access to the type and scale of information we need to make decisions,” said Ordaz. “It is very easy to compare actuals and budget vs. prior year and change the reporting from one year or quarter to another. Now we have reliable and trusted information for internal use and for the auditors. We can certify that our numbers are correct!”

OneStream also provides individual entities the power to reconcile their intercompany balances with other entities before the month closes to ensure complete and accurate details of their balances. “It’s not as complicated now having different ERPs,” said Ordaz. “We extract and consolidate that information in OneStream and directly analyze the balance sheet, suppliers, vendors and inventories—all that information in one system with different views of the same information for decision makers. Not only is it easier to access our data, but OneStream makes it easier to grow and make strong, quality decisions.”

About the Implementation Partner

Outliers Consulting is a Mexican-born company dedicated to providing solutions to improve our customers’ business processes through world-leading technologies. We are proud OneStream Partners since the beginning of 2017. The First in Mexico and Latin America. We have developed more than 40 successful projects and have more than 30 clients in the Americas, serving them from our offices in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica.

In the Corporate Performance Management division, our specialists have an average of 15 years of experience implementing these solutions solving multiple financial processes. Some of our main clients include industries in the Financial, Entertainment, Distribution and Logistics, Telecommunications, Media, and Consumer and Product sectors. For more information, visit Outliers-Consulting.com.

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.

View the Case Study