Transform with PwC and OneStream

Challenge:

Following its separation from a broader parent company, the newly formed standalone company embarked on a finance transformation journey to streamline the management reporting process, reduce manual efforts and implement a common planning and reporting platform.

• Desire to implement a standalone EPM system serving as a single source of truth
• Interim process was manual and time intensive
• Lack of data availability and self service capabilities available to end users
• Insufficient level of detail in COA structure to identify revenue or expense at the product level
• Unable to obtain financial and metric reporting to support product/activity based P&Ls

How did we help?

Across the span of four months, a diverse PwC team (US, AC, Talent Exchange) lead the implementation of the OneStream product through delivery of the following key areas:

• Design - Conducted design sessions with key stakeholders to understand and develop the most efficient data structure to allow the distributor to report, budget, and manage the business
• Build - Configuration of 13 dimensions, three sets of allocation business rules, custom allocations for 34 P&L line items, 25 custom built management reports (including four product P&Ls and reporting for subscriber metrics/KPIs)
• Train - Hosted two onsite training sessions at client site to train 70+ end users and demo the platform
• Test - Conducted UAT & SIT (53 cases) to ensure proper application functionality for end users and admins
• Data validation - Validated ten months of historical data between legacy system and OneStream to ensure integrity and accuracy

How did it go?

By collaborating with an engaged FP&A team, the project was able to successfully Go-Live with OneStream, a tool that will help them efficiently plan and report using a single source of truth.

PwC helped develop a new allocation methodology within OneStream, which allowed them to generate product specific P&Ls with detailed revenue and functional expense data – addressing key pain points from the previous reporting.

The solution has decreased the repetitive and time intensive tasks required to generate accurate management reporting outputs so that they can drive effective decision making. Additionally, end users have greater access to transparent and real time financial data compared to the legacy process.

Challenge:

This company was looking to upgrade from their timely and manual intensive offline excel close process to a new EPM tool with financial consolidation, account reconciliation and financial planning capabilities. The company was looking to address the following key business objectives driving need for change:

• Develop a standard corporate data model created in OneStream and create a common view for finance (integrated CoA)
• Promote consistency and provide additional visibility into operational expense reporting and trial balances
• Develop automated integrations from S/4 HANA to pull data for account recs and financial consolidations with added drill back capability.
• Leverage intercompany dimension to help achieve required elimination structures through consolidation methods, ownership structures and journal management

How did we help?

Across the span of four months, a diverse PwC team (US and AC) helped lead the implementation of the OneStream product through delivery of the following key areas:

• Design - Conducted design sessions with key stakeholders to understand and develop the most efficient data structure to allow finance to efficiently close, report, budget and manage the business
• Build - Configuration of an integration solution between S/4 HANA and OneStream, a unified OneStream chart of accounts, and a financial consolidation, account reconciliation, and financial planning solution
• Train - Hosted two onsite training sessions for end users and various additional sessions for system admins and functional process owners. Training decks and other materials provided
• Test - Conducted UAT & SIT (51 cases) to ensure proper application functionality for end users and admins
• Data validation - Loaded and validated 22 months of historical data from SAP ECC and S/4 HANA to ensure integrity and accuracy

How did it go?

By collaborating with an engaged finance and accounting team, the project was able to successfully Go-Live with OneStream, a tool that will help them efficiently close and report using a single source of truth.

PwC helped develop a new OneStream application with dimensionality sourced from S/4 HANA for financial consolidations, account reconciliations and financial planning.

As a result of this implementation, they will utilize OneStream capabilities for consolidations of all entities. OneStream will be integrated with S/4 HANA. Applicable “Actuals” dimensions are to be mirrored from S/4 HANA to OneStream to support financial consolidations, account reconciliations, and reporting. Additionally, the client will leverage OneStream to aggregate financial planning data through input forms for reporting and variance analysis.

Challenge:

• Legacy technology that was running out of vendor support and did not have a clear upgrade path
• Limited internal resources with full knowledge of the end to end consolidation process and application configurations
• Wish to become more modern and align with IT’s Cloud-based strategy

What did we help?

• Design - leveraging existing relationships and understand of client data and processes was able to confirm requirements and adapt to leading OneStream design
• Build - provided guidance on historical data archiving to meet regulators needs
• Train - Hosted two onsite training sessions for end users and various additional sessions for system admins and functional process owners. Training decks and other materials provided
• Test - Conducted UAT and SIT to ensure proper application functionality for end users and admins

How did it go?

By collaborating with an engaged finance and accounting team, the project was able to successfully implement a modern technology platform, allowing for the retirement of on-premise servers that had increased security risks.

PwC helped develop a technical architecture that facilitates an end-to-end automated data integration.

As a result of the implementation, they were able to use out of the box functionality and decreased reliance on custom rules to meet business needs.