As the leading Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution, OneStream's Intelligent Finance Platform has the power to transform the way your organization conducts Financial Planning and Analysis, Forecasting, Consolidations, and more.
However, getting the most benefit out of OneStream depends on properly rolling out, implementing, and managing your OneStream system based on the specific needs of your company.
Ultimately, a properly managed OneStream platform is key to the long term success of and transformation of your company’s FP & A.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the key challenges that medium and large organizations face when executing and managing an implementation of OneStream. Then, we discuss some of the solutions for dealing with these challenges and look at how CPM Managed Services can help mitigate these issues.
The Essence of OneStream Challenges
Maximizing the power of OneStream as a CPM solution comes with certain challenges inherent to any major system implementation.
While OneStream can simplify and improve the work of your finance team when it comes to forecasting, planning, analysis, and consolidation, it requires a combination of IT knowledge as well as domain specific knowledge. As a general rule, IT specialists are not well-versed in the nuts-and-bolts of corporate accounting and Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)
Similarly, employees and administrators on your financial team know the ins-and-outs of everything in your Accounting and FP&A process, but may not necessarily have experience managing a enterprise systems with their inherent technical support and administrative processes and procedures (e.g. Change Management, SOX-related controls, etc).
While you can attempt to train your Finance staff on the IT processes and procedures, or vice-versa, this places individuals in unfamiliar territory which significantly increases the risk of mistakes being made and a more lengthy and costly effort to develop the necessary competencies. Additionally, if your team was unable to fully invest in the necessary administrative training during the implementation project or were unable to be as fully engaged as was intended, this leaves your support team ill equipped to support your new CPM system day one.
Some of the typical mistakes we see include focusing on implementation without properly training staff, conflating user acceptance testing with the actual training of testers, failing to segment users based on their roles and specific uses within the OneStream application, and not engaging in ongoing staff training.
Your best bet is to avoid these issues upfront, but they certainly need to be rectified if you already finished your rollout and are struggling to leverage the platform’s full capabilities.
Why do Companies Face this Challenge?
Most organizations consider the OneStream implementation initially as a cost saving measure. Given OneStream’s capability to reduce the operational cost of data management and analytics while speeding up your team’s ability to make real-time FP&A decisions, cost-savings are certainly part-and-parcel of using OneStream.
Nevertheless, implementing OneStream is an investment that pays dividends the longer you use the system and leverage its capabilities. Viewing it as an immediate cost saving measure can trick your team into cutting costs on the upfront training and implementation. Unfortunately, this approach stunts the performance of your CPM investment and reduces the longer term financial benefits that comes from using OneStream to its full potential.
As anyone who has gone through a major home remodel can tell you, the upfront time spent on the design and planning process is as important as having the right skilled contractors who know how to look for and mitigate potential issues along the way. Engaging the right stakeholders in the upfront design and keeping an open mind to the possibility of changing some of your business processes to best align with your strategic goals is an important step to avoid propagating bad habits that may have developed over years. Along the same vein of thinking strategically about the design, thinking through how best to support the new system after the implementation will ensure the value you expected to see from your investment is not diminished due to poor governance and maintenance/support. This requires having a proper training plan during not only your implementation but also as an on-going professional development responsibility.
Solutions for Maximizing Your OneStream Implementation
Common actionable solutions to maximizing your OneStream migration include recruiting experienced OneStream support resources, hiring industry qualified resources (without OneStream experience) and training them on the administration of your OneStream system, or hiring resources from within your organization and training them on your OneStream implementation.
Hiring from outside of your company, especially when targeting candidates with OneStream administration experience, can be a time consuming, and expensive proposition. OneStream administration and consulting skillsets are highly sought for capabilities that have resulted in a highly competitive landscape for recruiters and companies need to be prepared for the time and expense to hire and retain these skilled resources.
Most companies will often prefer to hire candidates that have the functional skills sets (Accounting, FP&A, etc.) and combine a mix of minimal technical training with On-The-Job training to get their new resources up to speed
OneStream implementations and administration requires multiple roles and skillsets. System administrators are needed to manage the technical aspects of the platform, while finance administrators are needed for ensuring proper data, forecasting, and other key practical functionalities of the software.
As such, OneStream implementations and maintenance end up being a very human-capital intensive endeavor, especially when you lack the specialty staff. Recruiting takes time and money, as does retooling existing employees.
Consulting and hiring managed service providers who specialize in OneStream offers the best combination of the skills required for proper platform administration.
Support services, such as those offered by CompIntelligence, are the best of both worlds when it comes to having access to support resources that have both industry and technology experience to fully support your OneStream investment. These skills, developed over years of working with numerous OneStream customers, are vital to enabling an organization's realization of the value of the OneStream platform.
To put it simply, when it comes to realizing your cost savings as quickly as possible without sacrificing the training and functionality of OneStream, CPM Managed Services is the way to go.
Clarifications and Wildcards
Long Term OneStream Staff Needs for Large Organizations
While some modest implementations of OneStream can be supported by smaller support teams (i.e. one or two in-house administrators), larger organizations with larger, more complex, applications will inevitably require a larger multidiscipline support team. These teams will require staff with different combinations of functional business expertise and technical competencies.
In this case, choosing a mature CPM Managed Services provider with the ability to hire and retain experienced resources with these combinations of functional and technical backgrounds provides organizations an opportunity to right size their own in-house support teams and decide what competencies they want to invest in building out internally versus leverage an outside service provider to provide these specialized skill sets.
Scalable Support
You may already have team members in place responsible for your OneStream administration.
However, there are instances where your existing in-house support team doesn't have the bandwidth to handle surges in administrative or support activities (e.g. Close/Forecast periods), or your support team is left shorthanded when someone is out of the office. Having a CPM Managed Services provider ready to step in provides the peace of mind that these surges in administrative support activities or staffing shortages won't impact the business's operations.
Choosing CompIntelligence for OneStream Managed Services
CompIntelligence has over 15 years of specialization and 75 successful clients onboarded and managed on the OneStream platform. As a flexible CPM Managed Service provider, you pay specifically for the expert services you need while maintaining the option to scale up or down as your needs evolve.
This gives you the needed expertise and experience on a fraction of the budget it would take to hire the same level of in-house administrator or retrain existing staff. Whether you need fully outsourced administration or escalation support for your internal support team, our CPM Managed Services team can meet your specific needs. As your organization expands its use of the OneStream platform, we can adapt our support services to meet your evolving needs.
To find out how CompIntelligence can maximize the value of your OneStream CPM, contact us today.
