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The fourth largest independent TV station owner in the U.S. faced significant challenges with their legacy data analytics architecture. The system required constant administrative oversight, and basic queries took hours to run. Adding new data sources could take up to three months, stifling data exploration and delaying insight discovery. The architecture couldn't handle the volume of data necessary for key revenue-driving reports, leading to abandoned projects. Scale and performance limitations made it impossible to effectively analyze data across sources, with filters taking an hour or more to load. Additionally, the company lacked a way for the BI team to collaborate on analytics with their line of business counterparts or quickly share new insights with TV station leaders.

The BI team of a major international CPG brand faced scale limitations with Tableau, which often caused analyses to fail. This prevented the team from providing the necessary data to create customer profiles and a functional customer database. As a result, data had to be extracted from Snowflake via SQL queries for analysis in Excel, but these datasets were constrained due to Excel's scale limitations. The marketing team lacked insight into email campaign performance and could not develop accurate customer profiles or a searchable customer database. Customers were opting out of email communication because the emails were not relevant, leading to lost revenue opportunities from upsells, cross-sells, and repeat business.

The healthcare technology company faced significant challenges in optimizing its claim acceptance rate due to scale limitations and an inability to anticipate changing data needs. The Rules team struggled to identify which rules caused billing errors and resolve claims on the first pass. Obtaining data extracts for analysis in Excel involved a lot of back and forth with the data team, taking up to 30 days to see if new rules improved or negatively impacted the claim acceptance rate. This lack of timely access to data hindered the Rules team’s effectiveness, prevented the company from expanding its scope of work for clients, and impeded their ability to deliver a higher level of service.

The accounting team of a leading logistics real estate company faced significant challenges in conducting bad debt ratio analysis and ensuring compliance due to the limitations of their existing data visualization tool, Tableau. The tool would crash when filtering the general ledger (GL) data, which contained over 500 million rows, causing delays in report generation. Additionally, the team needed simultaneous access to transaction-level data, but had to extract data from Snowflake and use multiple Excel worksheets for analysis, leading to version control issues, security risks, and compliance concerns. The company estimated that these inefficiencies were costing them between $2.4M and $3.6M per year.

The Business Intelligence (BI) team faced several challenges due to the increasing demand for data. Fulfilling requests from business teams took up 20% or more of the BI team’s time each week. The complexity of PowerBI made it difficult for business teams, such as Finance and SalesOps, to use, leading to issues like security, governance, and compliance concerns due to data extracts, data sprawl, and outdated data. The BI team was unable to focus on strategic data initiatives and projects. The Finance team struggled to accurately understand customer behavior, product telemetry, and renewal rates, which hindered their ability to forecast revenue accurately. Similarly, the SalesOps team lacked a holistic view of the opportunity pipeline, customer-level pricing, and the impact of different discount rates on revenue, making it challenging to develop effective pricing strategies.

The Power & Performance Leads (PPL) team at a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer faced significant challenges in managing and analyzing vast amounts of data. The team relied on millions of data points housed within Snowflake to build custom data center solutions. However, their existing workflow, which involved using Power BI and Excel, was inefficient and led to bottlenecks, wasted time, and slow product cycles. The disjointed workflow also caused unplanned ad hoc requests, constant reprioritization of tasks, and analyst frustration. The PPL team often had to work evenings and weekends to keep up with the demands, leading to an overworked and stressed team.

The foodservice distributor faced significant challenges in managing its vast dataset, which included multi-billion rows of service level data. Employees needed timely access to this data to conduct root cause analysis and resolve issues to meet SLAs. However, scale limitations and the inability to anticipate ever-changing data requirements hindered their ability to access all necessary data. The BI team spent 20% of its time answering ad hoc questions and extracting data, which needed continuous refreshing as issues evolved. This lack of timely data access negatively impacted employees' ability to understand and resolve issues, leading to missed SLAs, penalties, and customer retention and acquisition challenges.

Our hardware engineers were translating algorithms developed by algorithm engineers into HDL using written specifications, and without knowing exactly how the algorithms worked. If the FPGA implementation did not perform like our simulations, we never knew if the implementation or the algorithm was the problem. And even a small change to the algorithm meant rewriting most of the HDL.

TaskUs' operations in the Philippines needed to do more with less. The company’s hiring requests were increasing, but its recruiting team was overwhelmed with manual processes and repetitive tasks that slowed down hiring activities. Valuable person-hours were spent on pre-screening leads through phone calls that resulted in high phone bills, low contact rates, and opacity on sourcing channel analytics. Prior to 2018, TaskUs used to consolidate its leads using various spreadsheets organized by application status. The time and attention required to manage these calls and spreadsheets were increasing and significantly impacting productivity. Even worse, the contact rate with leads dropped to 35%, meaning that most potential candidates were not even being considered.

Walmart, the multinational retail corporation, has aggressive targets to fulfil their hiring needs. With hypermarket chains and department stores in multiple continents, the company has a local approach when it comes to hiring, with Talent Acquisition teams for each of their regions. In Central America, Walmart has to fill positions for 1,800 stores, in four distinct verticals: sales, corporate, agriculture and distribution. To ease up manual processing, Walmart has rapidly become a regional innovator with their automated process powered by Talkpush. By relying on automated campaigns, the retailer has seen an increase in completion rates from 75% to 92% as well as 50% decrease in processing time per candidate.

McDonald’s Philippines faced a significant challenge in managing their recruitment process efficiently. With over 635 stores in the country, the company needed to streamline their hiring process for restaurant management and crew positions. The traditional methods were time-consuming, with response times to candidates taking up to 5 days. Additionally, the volume of applicants was relatively low, with only about 100 unique candidates per month. The company needed a solution that could handle a higher volume of applications, improve response times, and enhance the overall candidate experience.

Concentrix, a global leader in business services specializing in customer engagement, faced the challenge of managing a large talent pipeline and speeding up the recruitment process while ensuring an excellent candidate experience. They aimed to improve their processing rate and transition from a manual to a 99% automated workflow at the front of the funnel. The goal was to deliver an uninterrupted candidate experience from the moment they apply to the moment they are being interviewed for a specific role. This required integrating various platforms such as Talkpush, Facebook, Workday, and their assessment tool, Aspiring Minds.

Damen Shipyards, a multinational shipbuilding group with over 12,000 employees and a presence in more than 100 countries, faced significant challenges in managing their financial data. The company was in the process of rolling out a global IFS ERP system when the finance team realized they needed a better way to oversee the organization. They were using SAP BPC for financial consolidation, but the system was ultimately being held together by Excel spreadsheets, leading to a disjointed mess of data. Damen needed a modern corporate performance management platform to improve financial and fiscal compliance, data governance, streamline forecasting, and reduce business risk.

The Finance organization at Smart Wires was running mainly through Excel, and the company was feeling the compounding impacts. Challenged by multiple versions of the truth, critical business data was very disconnected. And from a SOX compliance perspective, Finance’s over-reliance on Excel was risky. The company experienced many limitations with working in Excel, including inefficiency, time consumption, and lack of auditability. Accuracy was a concern as they were planning and budgeting in Excel, until they implemented a true corporate performance management solution.

For five years, Hyperion Insurance Group had been using Anaplan for financial consolidation, group and divisional reporting, budgeting, and forecasting. However, they faced many difficulties with Anaplan, including reconciliation issues between models, lack of built-in reporting functionality, and basic audit logging. The group needed a next-generation corporate performance management (CPM) platform to replace Anaplan. Hyperion Insurance required a platform that was cloud-ready, modern, agile, and scalable to meet their business needs for the next five to ten years. They also needed a controlled close process and support for granular-level reporting, which Anaplan could not provide.

Leading by innovation is how Premium Sound Solutions achieves high customer satisfaction. But as a former Philips Electronics company, Premium Sound Solutions was still using their previous parent company’s Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) system for financial consolidation and reporting. Simply put, the legacy HFM system could not effectively keep up with the company’s growing global footprint. Premium Sound Solutions needed a more integrated and unified solution that would streamline data collection and processing to the needs of their management team. Premium Sound Solutions decided to look for a corporate performance management (CPM) platform that provided the ability to consolidate multiple data submissions into one product. Ideally, the solution would be easily manageable, user-friendly and able to replace their outdated reporting processes in HFM without creating a negative impact on end users or disrupting the monthly close processes. The Belgium-based organization needed a modernized CPM system with improved insight into currency translation calculations (Euro and US dollar) to support the quick and accurate analysis of operating results. Their wish list also included the ability to automate intercompany eliminations using historic overrides and integrated audit trail reporting for all changes made within the system.

Core requirements revolved around converting an Excel®-based model to a Financial Reporting system to manage continued growth. There was a significant need for automated and standardized management and external reporting.

Takeaway.com faced significant challenges in financial consolidation and reporting as it grew. Initially, the company relied on Excel® for data extraction and report generation, which was manageable when the company was smaller. However, as Takeaway.com expanded, this method became unsustainable due to scalability and reliability issues. The company needed a robust consolidation tool to ensure accurate financial management reports and support future growth. The IPO listing on Euronext Amsterdam further emphasized the need for a more reliable and scalable solution.

Printpack had been using Oracle Hyperion Planning and Essbase for over 15 years for budgeting and management reporting and was handling financial consolidation and reporting via Excel® spreadsheets. The design of these systems carried too many risks and points of failure with data having to be moved between systems. In addition, there were multiple points of maintenance for meta data. The big impact of this was the risk of producing inaccurate data and spending too much time on system administration. In addition, it took the Finance team too long to produce monthly financial statements, and it was difficult to accommodate change requests from management. In 2016, the Finance team reviewed their processes, identified the risks, and concluded they needed a better consolidation and reporting system. They also realized it would be better to have a single system to manage all CPM processes.

As a global company with multiple business units, reliance on Excel® spreadsheets and their Microsoft Dynamics Navision general ledger (GL) for financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting was no longer sufficient. These critical financial processes relied on manual efforts and took too long. Finance executives didn’t have visibility into the right level of operational detail or the impacts of currency rates on their financial results. Getting through the monthly financial close, forecast updates, and preparation for monthly business reviews using their existing tools and processes required a full two weeks—delaying delivery of management information and review of business performance. Business unit (BU) Controllers were spending too much time on data manipulation and not enough on analysis and supporting decision-making. It was time for a change.

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.

Founded in 1973, Team Industrial Services has grown to more than $1B in revenue and more than 7,000 employees through numerous acquisitions. However, a new acquisition the company was undertaking in 2016 was too big to integrate using the newly implemented MS Dynamics AX ERP and Excel® spreadsheets. The company needed a more powerful and scalable financial consolidation and reporting solution.

MEC Global was using Oracle’s Hyperion Enterprise for financial consolidation and reporting. As an aging solution, the software was becoming unstable and was losing data at critical times. This was slowing down the period-end close and consolidation process as users had to re-enter data and adjustments. In addition, due to its limited dimensionality the system was no longer supporting the reporting and analysis needs of the business. It was time for a change. With 36 countries reporting monthly, including over 70 entities and 15 local currencies, MEC’s financial consolidation and reporting process includes a high volume of intercompany activity. This new system has enabled big improvements in intercompany eliminations through improved automation and communication, as trading partners can see each other’s data and collaborate with each other to reconcile activity.

AFL was using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) for consolidation and reporting, and found the system too costly to manage, maintain and upgrade. Excessive downtime and lost data triggered the evaluation of alternative solutions. AFL was also using Excel® spreadsheets and email for budgeting, planning and forecasting which bogged down the planning processes.

Victaulic needed to replace Hyperion Enterprise and LedgerLink. Their requirements revolved around gaining consistent and accessible reporting, improving their data quality as well as simplifying their close processes. They lacked visibility into their month-end close, had no audit trails, and limited multi-currency support. Financial Reporting information was in Enterprise while FP&A information was in their BI tool. Sub-account, elimination entities, and alternate currency entities resulted in massive account and entity structures. Cash flow reporting for auditors was done manually in Excel® without the benefit of process transparency or audit controls.

Melrose PLC was using multiple Oracle Hyperion products for management and statutory reporting, as well as financial forecasting and scenario analysis. The fragmented architecture caused the finance team to spend a significant amount of time moving and maintaining metadata between multiple systems. As the organization continued to acquire additional businesses, it became increasingly difficult to roll-up and integrate disjointed data. Melrose needed a unified CPM solution that reduced the burden of maintaining multiple applications and allowed for complete visibility into data and process changes.

Johnson Outdoors was using Hyperion Enterprise for financial consolidation and reporting and had outgrown the solution. They needed to improve multiple finance processes such as consolidation, reporting, SOX, budgeting, data submission process, audit support, and cash flow reporting. Core requirements revolved around improving financial close processes for data collection, consolidation, and reporting. There was also a significant need for more extensive and detailed consolidated operational and sales reporting and a completely revamped budgeting, forecasting, and planning process. It was imperative that the solution was owned by Corporate Finance. Consolidated operational and sales reporting was extremely time-consuming and painful, and multiple systems were needed to provide consolidated reporting and the details behind the reporting. They needed to be able to provide detailed reporting capability to the business unit controllers to deliver an integrated global system that met both business and corporate needs.

Federal-Mogul was using Hyperion Enterprise for financial consolidation and reporting, but the legacy system needed immediate replacing. Hyperion did not provide an efficient data quality management solution and required substantial manual intervention for the collection of both financial and operational data. As a growing auto parts distributor, Federal-Mogul needed a scalable solution that could be deployed globally for financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting and analysis. They needed a system that delivered faster consolidations, easier maintenance and more powerful management reporting. Federal-Mogul wanted to give relevant management reporting to the OEM and aftermarket businesses, including operational HR data. Upgrading Hyperion would be a lengthy and expensive undertaking, so Federal-Mogul decided to look elsewhere, and was immediately interested in OneStream Software.

Wesco requirements revolved around complete replacement of an Excel based consolidation and reporting process for actual, plan and forecast. There was also a requirement for additional collections to help manage the business as well as complex currency conversion and reporting to help mitigate FX risk and exposure. Wesco was looking for a unified CPM solution that would simplify their financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, forecasting and analysis process. Two years of historical data that was very complex needed to be loaded and reconciled, reconciling to management and external reporting.

AAA Life Insurance Company was looking for faster and better reporting to gain a deeper insight into their business. Their previous Cognos solution was neither business user friendly nor flexible enough to meet their growing reporting needs. AAA Life Insurance needed a unified solution for financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, and analysis. A key requirement was the ability to drive the analysis down to the transaction level. They needed the ability to drill down from calculated or consolidated numbers all the way back to their transactional ERP system. It was very important for them to have the ability to investigate and verify critical items such as expense details.