HollandParker Client Case History | Engineering and Consulting Service Provider

A leading provider of professional engineering and consulting services required a new approach to financial consolidations after acquiring several consulting companies.

The company needed to transform consolidations at Corporate and business entity levels following acquisitions. The company was also preparing for an IPO, requiring a cleaner financial reporting process. Utilizing the OneStream platform and MarketPlace solutions, we restored order to financial consolidations and reporting.

Streamlined the close process from each business entity to Corporate.
Set up OneStream to properly record and eliminate intercompany transactions.
Built direct connects from multiple ERP systems to OneStream.
Standardized financial reporting to reduce audit risk prior to planned public offering.
Utilized OneStream MarketPlace solutions to support financial processes, audit trails, and internal controls.

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Summary

A leading provider of professional engineering and consulting services required a new approach to financial consolidations after acquiring several consulting companies. The company needed to transform their consolidations at the corporate level and at the business entity level following the acquisitions. The company was also preparing for an IPO, requiring a cleaner accounting and financial reporting process. After the company selected OneStream XF as their CPM platform, we implemented OneStream to maximize efficiency, accuracy, and reliability of consolidated financials.

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The Problem

Why Engineering and Consulting Service Provider Approached HollandParker?

The acquisitions occurred in a short period of time and each company had their own financial processes and ERP. This resulted in a tremendous burden on corporate to consolidate financials and perform analysis at any level below the financial statement line item. Corporate also lacked the ability to create consolidated reporting for operational statistics. Additional challenges included:

Corporate team was manually consolidating entities and performing intercompany eliminations in Excel, resulting in an extended close process.
Acquired companies had not been reconciling intercompany balances.
Allocations between direct and indirect expenses for one subsidiary lacked visibility into pre-adjusted numbers.
Needed to centralize utilization data. Prior to OneStream, data was held in individual ERPs with no consistency in utilization calculations and reporting.
Lack of standardized financial reporting and Excel-based consolidations and eliminations created audit risk prior to going public.

The Solution

How We Approached the Problem

During this Consolidations phase of OneStream XF implementation, HollandParker restored order to financial consolidations, used the out-of-the-box capabilities of the platform to map financial data, and utilized OneStream XF MarketPlace solutions to support financial processes and pull ERP data. Our specific support included:

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Streamlined close process, provided additional visibility into revenue drivers, and set up OneStream XF to properly record and eliminate intercompany transactions.
Directly connected to ERPs for both financial and utilization cubes to streamline reporting. Due to 6 different ERP systems, 5 separate databases in one ERP, and the HR system, approximately 13 distinct direct connections were deployed.
Created Corporate Chart of Accounts at detail level with mapping from source systems.
Created Intercompany Matching rules and provided a tool for reconciling balances.
Satisfied request for utilization data to include critical details according to functional grouping and other job specs, which was previously derived from Excel spreadsheets.
Utilized People Planning solution from XF MarketPlace to handle detailed input for utilization and allow for different dimensions from financial processes.
Utilized XF MarketPlace solutions for Security and Metadata changes to enhance audit trails for user access and to support internal controls for pre-IPO audit.
Provided roadmap for integrating newly acquired entities in an expedient manner.
Built cash flow to properly adjust for Day 1 balance sheet for acquired entities.

Here Are the Key Achievements for This Client

We completed Phase one of implementation for Consolidations with the following results:

Each entity now uploads financials within minutes of closing books vs. previous unreliable approach of preparing financial statements for consolidation.