Carlyle GroupOneStream XF Success Story
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 carlyle.com.
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 For financial consolidation and reporting the company was using an outdated version of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) that wasn’t compatible with Windows 10, and had a complicated design that made change management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.
- Financial Consolidation & Reporting
- Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting
- Financial Data Quality
- People Planning
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.
- Consolidation times reduced by more than 50%
- Revenue and expense budget updates reduced from 1 week to 5-10 minutes
- Updating allocation metrics reduced from 1 week to 30-60 minutes
- Updating headcount assumptions reduced from 1 week to 20 minutes