Xylem

Xylem Overview

Xylem (XYL) is a leading global water technology company committed to developing innovative technology solutions to the world’s water challenges. The Company’s products and services move, treat, analyze, monitor and return water to the environment in public utility, industrial, residential and commercial building services settings. Xylem also provides a leading portfolio of smart metering, network technologies and advanced infrastructure analytics solutions for water, electric and gas utilities. Xylem has over 17,000 employees, had 2018 revenue of $5.2 billion, and does business in more than 150 countries. https://www.xylem.com/en-us/
 

The Challenge

Having been spun out of ITT in 2011, and as the result of several acquisitions, Xylem was using several Oracle Hyperion EPM applications to support their financial close, reporting and planning processes. This included three Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) applications, three Hyperion Planning applications, and instances of both Oracle Hyperion FDM and FDMEE.

Each of these systems contained different levels of detail required to support corporate vs. line of business reporting and planning requirements. With over 500 users across divisions and locations, it was a very fragmented and complex process to load, adjust, and report data with multiple applications and offline Excel® models in the mix.

The Xylem team initially considered upgrading and re-designing their on-premise Hyperion applications, but the effort and expected price tag of over $1M caused them to consider alternative solutions. Finit Solutions then introduced Xylem to OneStream™ .

After several demos, many positive reference calls, and a visit to OneStream’s Splash™ user conference – the team was convinced that OneStream’s unified CPM platform and OneStream MarketPlace™ solutions could meet their current and future needs. An ROI analysis projecting a lower cost of ownership for OneStream vs. the Hyperion suite also firmed up their decision to make the leap to OneStream.
 

The OneStream Solution

The initial phase of the OneStream implementation was focused on replacing all the Hyperion applications spanning financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting and planning for the entire organization – all in a 9-month timeframe and while undergoing an implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).

Working with Finit, the Xylem team leveraged OneStream’s Extensible Dimensionality® to support all their requirements in a single application – with a flexible model that supports local cost center reporting as well as global functional reporting requirements.
 

Increasing Visibility into Financial and Line of Business Results

OneStream’s Extensible Dimensionality was heavily used to collect detailed data and provide management visibility into financial and operating results by product, branch, project and cost center. The required details are reported at the entity level, but not consolidated to Global Xylem.

Xylem leveraged the power of OneStream to move from a 2D view of cash flow to a 3D view that allows for visibility into more granular detail. OneStream also supports the collection of supplemental data required for quarterly and annual SEC filings, as well as the detailed sales information required for each of Xylem’s end-markets and account detail needed for quarterly/annual reporting.
 

Benefits Achieved

Xylem has already achieved many benefits from their OneStream implementation. By integrating 100+ local general ledgers to streamline the submission process for actual data, data load times for some global users decreased from 6-8 hours to 15 minutes.

Prior to using OneStream, Xylem used a manually created 10,000-line journal entry to allocate 3 types of expense categories (GA, COS and Sales & Marketing) across business segments. With OneStream the allocation process is now automated and the 10,000-line journal entry was eliminated. The allocation is run for actual and budget scenarios and allows for more detailed and accurate reporting of operating results.

The new OneStream system also houses weekly flash data for sales and orders. This data had never been available globally in a system prior to OneStream. In addition, the system houses flux analysis for monthly & quarterly variance explanations. OneStream’s out-of-the-box annotation members facilitate collection and reporting of this data.

"The ability to collect more granular data in OneStream facilitates better, faster business decisions and the confirmation rules built into OneStream ensure data integrity," said Mark DiMatteo, Sr. Manager CPM Systems at Xylem. "With OneStream we have more time available to spend analyzing data rather than updating data and the flexibility of OneStream provides the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs."

The Xylem team has also seen a decrease in technical support needs as a result of using OneStream’s unified platform and by deploying via the Microsoft® Azure Cloud.
 

About OneStream™ Software

OneStream Software provides a market-leading intelligent finance platform that reduces the complexity of financial operations. OneStream unleashes the power of finance by unifying corporate performance management (CPM) processes such as planning, financial close & consolidation, reporting and analytics through a single, extensible solution. We empower the enterprise with financial and operational insights to support faster and more informed decision-making. All in a cloud platform designed to continually evolve and scale with your organization.

OneStream’s Intelligent Finance platform can easily be extended with over 50 solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace. These downloadable solutions are fully battle-tested and optimized for the OneStream platform. They allow customers to easily extend the value of their investment to meet the changing needs of finance and operations.

For more information, please visit OneStream Software https://www.onestream.com or on Twitter @OneStream_Soft.

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