CFO’s are making plans to prepare for a new age of finance transformation – the post-pandemic finance. How has the industry changes over the last two decades?

For many businesses, a post pandemic finance industry involves making a significant move from just focusing on automating vital financial processes. A post-pandemic finance industry requires a more strategic approach, it involves teams and businesses responding in a collective manner, and quickly. 

While traditional corporate performance management services such as Oracle’s Hyperion have supported finance professionals in automating important processes for many years, they aren’t necessarily the perfect tools to support a post-pandemic finance industry. This is largely down to the fragmented structure of these systems and the associated costs with upgrades that result in added pressure on finance teams to manage processes, rather than focus their attention on data, analytics and important decisions that need to be made in a post pandemic finance industry.

While vendors are transitioning towards the cloud, the systems continue to remain relatively fragmented and a number of these applications lack some of the vital capabilities of the traditional on-premises systems.

Which areas to consider in determining if your legacy tools are sufficient for post-pandemic finance. 

• Are the legacy tools used in your business reaching their end of life? 
• Does your finance team need to shift data between various applications to provide actual and variance budget analysis?
• Are upgrades for new releases expensive and potentially disruptive to your business processes?
• Does your business need to use additional modules to support your centralised management processes?

Whilst there are some limitations for newer cloud solutions, Oracle and SAP have confirmed plans to remove support for a number of on-premise applications and are applying more pressure on their customers to shift towards cloud applications. IT professionals and other industry analysts are encouraging finance professionals to explore other alternatives before making the move towards legacy vendor cloud services. Industry experts highlight that there are a number of viable and effective alternatives available with modern infrastructure, new capabilities and the ability to support on-premise and cloud services.

One alternative providers is OneStream Software. OneStream provides a innovative corporate performance management solution, known as the OneStream XF SmartCPM platform. OneStream XF combines and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting and analytics for a number of organisations.

OneStream is the first solution provider that offers corporate standards with the added flexibility for businesses to be capable of reporting and planning at various levels of details without affecting their corporate standards. The core of a SmartCPM solution is the ability to provide multiple solutions for budgets, forecasts and plans, all within a single application. OneStream XF reduces the risk associated with integrations, validations and reconciliation between a number of products, applications and modules.

London based business Melrose Industries PLC focuses in buying and improving underperforming companies. The finance team focuses on a combination of Oracle tools to perform their planning, analysis and forecasting. As the organisation continued to acquire other businesses, it became more challenging to collect and assimilate data. Melrose require a singluar CPM solution that not only is capable of reducing the effort of managing multiple services, but also provide total transparency in terms of data and process changes.

When exploring CPM solutions, the vital requirement for Melrose was having an efficient and agile solution that provided flexibility and was capable of retaining historical data. Implementing OneStream enabled Melrose to manage a single platform that incorporates their reporting requirements, improves analysis and provides complete visibility. 

Melrose explains that OneStream has provided the business with one product that includes everything needed for their reporting requirements. The biggest benefit of using OneStream is that anyone in the extended group, in any location, can use the system. In previous years Melrose has relied on a range of systems, but now all of this has been removed. Melrose now relies solely on OneStream, delivering one singular system of truth that is always available and works.