Client Success History | Industrial Technology Firm

A global leader in industrial technology needed to improve and streamline their forecasting process to generate reliable reports for management.

The company was using the OneStream intelligent finance platform for financial consolidations and needed to break their dependency on Excel spreadsheets for forecasting. The HollandParker team strategized a way to use actual data that was already in OneStream to complete their forecast process.

Improved forecasting by reducing 9 Excel formats into just 4 data source formats.
Generated time savings turning an Excel-based data comparison into a push-button process.
Increased transparency and accuracy compared to the previous Excel process.
Reduced stress of additional data manipulation by allowing data to be immediately viewed after loading.
Increased company-wide understanding of forecasting to improve decision-making.

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Summary

A global leader in industrial technology needed to improve and streamline their forecasting process to generate reliable reports for management. The company was using the OneStream intelligent finance platform for financial consolidations and needed to break their dependency on Excel spreadsheets for forecasting. The HollandParker team strategized a way to use actual data that was already in OneStream to complete their forecast process.

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The Problem

Why Industrial Technology Firm Approached HollandParker?

We encountered three main challenges supporting the project.

Our client needed to centralize and standardize existing data in OneStream to streamline forecasting. Previously, the company used a complex method of forecasting using Excel. The data spanned several sub-departments, which translated to separate Excel files with different formatting. Also, each subdepartment used their own set of drivers to generate forecasts.
The company needed to use the workflow profile functionality of OneStream to enable a secure and step-by-step process for their end-users to complete forecasting.
The new forecast process needed to match the existing management processes for consolidations (actuals). The company needed the structure to stay in place while also seeding in actuals to the forecast scenarios.

The Solution

How We Approached the Problem

We addressed key challenges blending the existing consolidations data with forecasting, set up OneStream to work on behalf of the company delivering timely forecasting reports, and optimized processes according to management’s timeline requirements.

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Leveraged existing consolidation application dimensionality in OneStream and added required forecast scenarios.
Pre-populated data for each forecast scenario via a data management process.
Created a security process allowing data to be loaded by multiple end-users.
Updated the existing business rule transferring data across hierarchies.
Created transformation rules that standardized data being loaded across workflows.
Set unique workflow profiles for each department to accommodate data preferences.
Introduced cube views unique to each department that allowed users to view their data after loading and to export data for reporting.
Set up actuals to be seeded into forecast scenarios before performing consolidation.
Ensured that numerous users had access to data for analysis, review, and updating.
Provided repeatable views of data for comparison to actuals and ad-hoc analysis.
Created a set of reports to satisfy the client’s forecasting reporting requirements.

Here Are the Key Achievements for This Client

Improved forecasting by reducing 9 Excel formats into just 4 data source formats.

Generated time savings turning an arduous Excel-based data comparison into a push-button data process.

Reduced the stress of additional data manipulation by allowing data to be immediately viewed after loading.

Increased company-wide understanding of forecasting through custom cube views so that each department could view data in a structure familiar to them.