About Valeo Foods
Valeo Foods is one of Europe’s fastest growing consumer foods producers, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with a portfolio of 68 international brands. Valeo Foods has quadrupled in size since its formation in 2010, and has successfully acquired 12 leading food businesses post formation. Valeo Foods has €870 million annual sales spread across 92 global markets. For more information, visit valeofoodsgroup.com.
The Challenge
Valeo Foods Group had grown significantly through acquisitions, yet was still using Excel® for its monthly close and consolidation process.
All the local operating entities reported their data from different source systems in Excel sheets. These sheets were then emailed to the Group Finance team to collate both management and statutory information in Excel. This included consolidations for foreign currency translations,which was becoming more difficult as the group expanded into new geographies with different reporting currencies.
The manual nature of the consolidation process presented challenges in calculating these scenarios. On top of this, as each financial year passed, the Excel consolidated model continued to get larger with increased complexity and was becoming unsustainable. Both management and statutory reporting was completed in Excel and was becoming increasingly cumbersome and prone to error.
“We then started the search for a sustainable tool to enable the way forward,” says Dónal Staunton of Valeo Foods, Group Finance. “We needed to safeguard the creation of financial and management reports with a modern solution offering the agility to support future growth.”
The OneStream XF Solution
Valeo Foods began reviewing corporate performance management (CPM) products and evaluated several options, both large and small. Given the acquisitive nature of the business, Valeo Foods wanted to assess in detail which solution was flexible enough to account for these critical and frequent business changes. Agium EPM, a Dutch-based Platinum OneStream Partner, was asked to show Valeo how OneStream XF would cope with their requirements. They explained how the implementation would work in a detailed design document. “Ultimately, OneStream was selected based on positive feedback from global research firms, and after a demonstration of the platform’s capability during the vendor selection process,” says Staunton. “Also, the many positive reviews from calls we conducted with existing OneStream customers firmed up our decision.”
Benefits Achieved
As a result of the implementation, Valeo Foods has realized significant improvement in management reporting and financial statements, which is recognized by many stakeholders. “With OneStream, we are benefitting from the increased reporting transparency and analysis possibilities,” adds Staunton. “There is now one version of the truth.”
The monthly close is finalized in a significantly faster (roughly three to four days) and more efficient manner, with the reduction in use of Excel leading to improved data quality. In total, close to 30 spreadsheets were eliminated from use in the monthly process. This gives Staunton and the Valeo Foods Group Finance team the opportunity to spend additional time on the review and analysis of data and results as opposed to merely preparing reports.
Further, Valeo Foods now has all relevant details of the group consolidated equity and goodwill of each entity. The local entities can reconcile their intercompany balances with other entities and have comprehensive and accurate details of their balances. OneStream provides Valeo Foods many built-in validations, resulting in intercompany differences to be identified instantly and resolved easily at local entity level.
About OneStream Software
OneStream Software provides a marketleading CPM 2.0 solution, the OneStream XF SmartCPM™ platform. OneStream XF unifies and simplifies financial consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics and financial data quality for sophisticated organizations. Deployed via the cloud or on-premise, OneStream’s unified platform enables organizations to modernize Finance, replace multiple legacy applications, and reduce the total cost of ownership of financial systems. OneStream unleashes Finance teams to spend less time on data integration and system maintenance – and more time focusing on driving business performance.
The OneStream XF MarketPlace features more than 50 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, please visit OneStream Software http://www.onestreamsoftware.com or on Twitter @OneStream_Soft.
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