The Carlyle Group is a global alternative asset manager with $195 billion of assets under management across 317 investment vehicles. Founded in 1987 in Washington, DC, Carlyle has grown into one of the world’s largest and most successful investment firms, with more than 1,600 professionals operating in 31 offices in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. For more information, visit www.carlyle.com.
“Now that we’re live, I can truly attest to and appreciate the value we’re getting from a single, integrated CPM platform. We have dramatically simplified our technical landscape while improving our reporting and analysis capabilities through the use of extensibility, self-service workflow-based reporting, etc.”
Ryan Wild | VP, Global Technology & Solutions
Carlyle had been struggling with a fragmented approach to their financial reporting and planning needs. For financial consolidation and reporting the company was using an outdated version of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) that wasn’t compatible with Windows 10, and had a complicated design that made change management difficult. They were facing increased costs for extended support, and Oracle was pushing their cloud offering which offered limited functionality.
For financial budgeting and planning, Carlyle was using Business Objects Planning which was no longer supported by SAP and was running on an outdated and unsupported operating system. There was no flexibility to expand the application’s functionality, and no ability to automate actuals vs. budget reporting and analysis due to differing levels of detail between systems.
In addition, Carlyle was using a legacy HR budgeting and forecast system that was single user, causing version control issues. The system relied heavily on Excel-based data integrations, with limited and manual reporting and manual maintenance of key reference data.
The Carlyle team evaluated Oracle’s EPM Cloud and other alternatives and agreed that an investment in OneStream made the most sense, if the platform was used to replace the existing financial and HR planning systems, as well as HFM for financial consolidation and reporting, and other point solutions such as account reconciliations in the future.
The Carlyle team projected that an investment in OneStream would yield the strongest ROI (36% over 5yrs) when compared to an all-Oracle investment. Key drivers of savings/cost avoidance in the business case included avoidance of costly upgrades, reduced IT/admin staffing, and reduced software maintenance costs.
With OneStream, Carlyle implemented a direct connect to their PeopleSoft GL and automated the loading Excel-based templates that were done manually before. They now perform matching of intercompany GL balances in transactional currencies to isolate true FX impact. They also use Guided Workflow for loading non-GAAP data, and have segment reporting aligned with FP&A.
With OneStream, Carlyle leverages the direct connect with PeopleSoft to load project-level actuals, and is now able to budget and reforecast at both the legal entity and project level. In additional to automating reporting and segment allocations, the company has improved visibility and traceability into allocations and budget version changes, with real-time budget impact viewing capabilities. And they have implemented decentralized, self-service reporting and analysis for business usersthat enables them to see the immediate impact of changes on plans and reports, driving a new level of efficiency and control at the business user level.
Leveraging the People Planning solution from the OneStream XF MarketPlace, Carlyle now has detailed modeling capabilities for new positions, promotions, transfers, and other adjustments. The solution includes compensation and benefit drivers by geography supporting their global employee base. And, changes to the workforce plan can be pushed into their Financial cube in a matter of minutes to so that budget owners can see the impact in real-time.
Carlyle was able to simplify their IT landscape and reduce costs compared to their previous Hyperion system. OneStream was easier to install, taking 90 minutes via WebEx, and VMs used for OneStream were less than half that of Hyperion. System monitoring is much easier and Carlyle has received immediate responses to support tickets with rapid issue resolution.
The implementation of OneStream has resulted in significant process improvements for Carlyle. Consolidating a full year of GAAP actuals was reduced from 6-8 hours to 3-4 hours while including significantly more detail than was previously loaded in Hyperion (e.g., project-level details). Submitting revenue and expense budget updates and reviewing the impact was reduced from 1 week to 5-10 minutes. Updating allocation metrics and reviewing the impact was reduced from 1 week to 30-60 minutes and is now run four times daily. And updating headcount assumptions and reviewing the impact was reduced from 1 week to 20 minutes.
Carlyle plans to extend their use of OneStream with XF MarketPlace solutions for Account Reconciliations and Close Management. Other areas under consideration include decentralizing their use of People Planning, implementing Cash Forecasting for Treasury, financial reporting for fund accounting, and advanced scenario modeling for FP&A and key budget/forecast stakeholders.
OneStream Software provides a revolutionary corporate performance management (CPM) solution that unifies and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics, and financial data quality for sophisticated organizations. Deployed in the cloud or on-premise, OneStream XF is the first and only solution that delivers corporate standards and controls, with the flexibility for business units to report and plan at additional levels of detail without impacting corporate standards – all through a single application.
The OneStream XF MarketPlace features downloadable solutions that allow customers to easily extend the value of their CPM platform to quickly meet the changing needs of finance and operations. We are driven by our mission statement that every customer must be a reference and success.
For more information, visit OneStream Software http://www.onestreamsoftware.com or on Twitter @OneStream_Soft.
