ITG

The Challenge

ITG was using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) for financial consolidation and reporting but was outgrowing the capabilities of these products.

The system was becoming unstable due to infrastructure issues, causing downtime during critical periods. Upgrades had become painful and costly. Complex allocations had to be done outside the system and were difficult to support, and the system lacked the agility needed to respond to ongoing changes in the business. An impending software and hardware upgrade caused the ITG Finance team to evaluate their options.
 
 

Selecting OneStream™

As the ITG team considered their alternatives, given their complex requirements their only choice was to either upgrade to the latest release of HFM or switch to OneStream.

With Oracle HFM, upgrading to the most current release would not have provided the ITG team with any new capabilities. The on-premise solutions were fragmented, as were the cloud-based alternatives from Oracle. Customer support from Oracle was in decline, and future upgrades would continue to be costly and time-consuming.

After doing a side-by-side comparison with HFM, the ITG team decided to convert to OneStream. Some of the key factors in the selection included the unified architecture of the platform, familiarity and ease of use, greater functionality, improved reporting, and built-in guided workflow for the users.
 
 

Improving Financial Consolidation and Reporting

ITG focused their initial implementation of OneStream on their global financial consolidation and reporting process, which involved collecting data from multiple locations and currencies. The system was configured to support their financial and management reporting, with budget information being imported from their JD Edwards general ledger.

ITG is also supporting their complex allocation process in OneStream. The system allows ITG to execute and report on cost allocations on a real-time basis, which means any time data is entered or updated, the allocation process runs and produces updated results. This was a big advantage over the prior batch process that was run outside the system.

The Guided Workflow capabilities of OneStream guide end-users through the key tasks they need to complete during the financial close process. The ITG team is also taking advantage of several OneStream MarketPlace™ solutions. This includes the Postal Service solution, which automates report distribution, as well as the Snippets solution which provides a library of pre-built business rules that can be copied and pasted into the application, saving the time and effort required to write custom business rules.
 
 

Reaping the Benefits

The ITG team has seen numerous benefits from their OneStream implementation. End-user training and acceptance was very smooth due to the familiar structure of OneStream compared to HFM.

According to Wayne Zeiler, Director of Financial Systems at ITG, “The end-user experience with OneStream was so intuitive that new users were able to pick up the system quickly, after only about 20 minutes of training.”

Mr. Zeiler further commented, “Time-savings have been achieved in several areas. Data load times are faster. Allocations that used to take hours are now completed in minutes and are executed dynamically as data is changing. And overall the financial close process has been improved by 1 – 2 days per month.”

“Upgrades to new releases have become much easier with OneStream, typically completed in 2 hours,” said Mr. Zeiler. “And the responsiveness of the OneStream customer support team is outstanding – typically responding within minutes of us entering a support ticket.”

Future Plans

Now that the financial consolidation and reporting process has been improved, the ITG team is looking to extend their use of OneStream. This includes evaluating the Account Reconciliations, Lease Accounting, and Tax Provision solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace.
 
 

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.
 
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