Case Study — OneStream
Lawrence & Hanson Unified Finance Transformation
67%
Reduction in Budget & Forecast Time
250
Minutes Saved per Data Load
3
Weeks (Down from 9)
1
Unified Platform
About the Client
Lawrence & Hanson
Lawrence & Hanson is part of Sonepar, the global market leader in B-to-B distribution of electrical products, solutions, and related services. With over 150 national branches across Australia and New Zealand, Lawrence & Hanson strive to be the wholesaler of choice for knowledge, customer service, digital business solutions, consistent pricing and stock availability.The Challenge
Manual Processes & an Aging Platform
For several years, Lawrence & Hanson relied on an on-premises financial reporting system heavily supplemented by manual Excel calculations. In addition to providing little functionality for forecasting and analysis, their existing version was to become unsupported at the end of 2021. For the Finance Team to support the business’s growth more effectively, it was essential that the new system modernise and streamline their planning and reporting processes, with enhanced “what-if” scenario analysis capability to react quickly to shifts in a fast-moving business environment.Business Challenges
- On-premises financial reporting system becoming unsupported
- Heavy reliance on manual Excel calculations for consolidation and reporting
- Limited functionality for forecasting and analysis
- Time-consuming and labour-intensive month-end reporting processes
- Risk around data quality due to manual Excel-based data manipulation
- Need for enhanced scenario analysis capability
- Requirement to reduce IT support and network costs
The Evaluation
Finding the Right Platform
Lawrence & Hanson undertook a market scan based on a leading analyst organisation’s research and assessment of CPM/EPM applications. A dedicated Evaluation Team defined the key requirements and assessed a short-list of market-leading vendors, surveying each vendor’s current customers to gain insight into the implementation and benefits realisation experience. Key requirements included a platform that could be extended to provide additional value-add capabilities, a move to the Cloud, automation of manual processes, and a significant reduction in Excel-based data manipulation. Once the team saw OneStream in action, it became apparent that this was the best fit for their immediate requirements and offered additional capability to further leverage business value from the investment.“The fact that we can now leverage our data very effectively to drive our consolidation, budgeting and forecasting processes for faster close and more timely reporting for our stakeholders is a significant advantage.”
Trevor Childs — Finance Business Partner, Lawrence & Hanson
Implementation
Driving Business Performance with James & Monroe
Lawrence & Hanson selected James & Monroe as their implementation partner and is now live with the initial implementation. As part of the implementation, monthly trial balance data is now sourced via automated loads from their ERP, and employee data from the HR system via file-based integration. OneStream functionality has delivered multi-currency consolidation, enhanced management reporting and ad-hoc analysis capability, and planning, budgeting, and forecasting capability. Lawrence & Hanson takes full advantage of Extensible Dimensionality® to facilitate the unique requirements of Region and Branch-level budgeting and leverages predictive capability using historical data to seed the forecasts. By leveraging unique workflow functionality, the effort and time taken to produce budgets and forecasts has been streamlined significantly with a 67% time saving.Scope
Solutions Delivered
Financial Close & Consolidation
Multi-currency consolidation with automated ERP data loads, delivering near real-time visibility of financial data across Australian and New Zealand operations.Budgeting & Forecasting
Driver-based forecast modelling with Extensible Dimensionality for Region and Branch-level budgeting, achieving a 67% reduction in cycle time.People Planning
Integration of HR application data to seamlessly drive key employee-related costs through budgeting and forecasting processes at no additional software cost.Results
Key Benefits
67% reduction in time to produce budgets and forecasts — from 9 weeks down to 3 weeks
250 minutes saved per cycle by automating manual data loads from the ERP
Cloud deployment on MS Azure reduced both internal IT and third-party application support costs
Extensible Dimensionality facilitates unique Region and Branch-level budgeting requirements with seamless roll-up to Sonepar
Pre-defined workflows enable each user to complete their reporting cycle independently with step-by-step quality checkpoints
Enhanced management reporting, ad-hoc analysis, and dashboarding with Excel add-in for actuals/forecast vs. budget reporting
“Replacing our old system and the multitude of Excel spreadsheets we needed to use to get things done was challenging, but OneStream provided the platform we needed to do it effectively. Moving to a single, unified platform has changed the way Finance operates for the better.”
Trevor Childs — Finance Business Partner, Lawrence & Hanson
What’s Next
Extending the Solution
Lawrence & Hanson has a solid foundation for future initiatives to extend the value of their investment. Areas under consideration include further automation of reporting processes, additional forecast scenarios, and expanded use of predictive analytics capabilities to drive better business outcomes. “There are many areas I can see that are going to be faster for us and that will drive better outcomes for our business. We also have a solid foundation for future initiatives to extend the value of our investment. For us, OneStream was the right choice.”Implementation Partner