OneStream vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

OneStream is best suited for medium to large companies that find themselves doing a wide variety of manual processes during their financial close cycle will get the most benefit. That does mean a lot of change so there has to be very intentional communication around change management in order to get the buy in that is necessary for success.

Incentivized

For a large company trying to bring processes and functions together with one tool, SAP BPC is a great solution. It requires hours of effort to implement and configure, which would not be appropriate for smaller companies. SAP BPC also requires dedicated resources to maintain the system on a day to day basis, as well as an administrator type personnel who can troubleshoot slow performance or issues with the system. You also need users who are willing and exciting to use this system and actually trust that this is a solution.

Incentivized

• Consolidation engine is powerful, we have around 500 entities translating from multiple source currencies into a common currency at good speed.
• We leverage the Flash and Quarterly forecast providing users with pre seeded data so they only need to make tweaks rather then filling in a lot of manual forms.
• We use Transaction matching for processing a lot of intercompany matching invoices from the ERP systems which helps end users a lot. Data is fed in from source ERPS and TXM generates the auto matches based on criteria provided.
• We have a custom Tax module which we use to pull in tax entries from the consolidation side and this gives the Tax teams starting position for their tax calculations and enables them to also do a quarterly forecast estimate.
• OneStream has great dashboarding capabilities for a whole range of use cases from charts and graphs, to drill-back data to running even steps that users can execute without having access to the source code/rules in the background!

• Allows for full integration of data to be analyzed in real time. Although we still load actuals on a delayed basis (2 business days after month end), when developing the budget, we not longer have to do a full loading process from a different application into BPC prior to being able to report and analyze the current budget status to prior budget versions or actuals.
• It is easy to learn basic report building. The hardest part is learning the available dimensions and the different possible combinations and their results, but that will also vary from company to company depending on the complexity of the industry.

Incentivized

• Provide some more prebuilt dashboards that serve as reference examples for specific topics, to allow users to gain an idea of all that is possible
• Provide some clear cut explanations to explain some of the standard concepts, to allow companies that start their implementation to gain a quick understanding of how things work

• When a change is needed in the EPM reports it is not very flexible and needs IT intervention
• Performance sometimes is an issue when consolidating more then 20 entities specially at quarter end
• Script logic complex to handle and always needs BPC consultant when changes are requiered even if minimal - has very high costs

Incentivized

Currently we are using OneStream with people 80 - 100 to load the PL, BS , Forecast budget and People Planning. OneStream give us more visibility on trend and way forward thinking. Thanks to OneStream for the tool which helps the business in growing way. Thinking of innovation OneStream is right path.

Incentivized

Overall usability as an end-user is very easy. There are more people in the system getting information now than the prior platform used. People are gathering their information quicker as well. From an administrator standpoint, there are fewer glitches and issues than the prior platform. This is very good.

Incentivized

Unlike other SAP traditional products, SAP BPC was meant to be simple and familiar to financial users

Incentivized

OneStream support is focused on the infrastructure. Which means mainly when there issues with accessing to the system, they will be able to help. When the question is to much leaning towards functional it really becomes billable. The other issue is that the response time is not optimal. There is a lot of pingpong of messages and the time between the message can sometimes be long. Sometimes this result into a simple ticket to be taking days before it is closed.

Incentivized

We need a big support team with various skillset like BPC, ABAP, BW, HANA, FICO etc

Incentivized

SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.

Incentivized

onestream offers a range of training. I have attended a number of trainings. During the trainings a vast amount of information is discussed. The trainings also include exercises. The speed of the training is pretty high. When reviewing the training material afterwards, I found that the material is not complete as reference as it relies also very much on the verbal explanation and elaboration.

Incentivized

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

Incentivized

The implementation was carried out in two phases spread over a period of 4 years with 2 upgrades in between. We also had multiple upgrades to HANA.

Incentivized

OneStream is much more robust, has functionality around creating financial statements in Common Currency which other systems we used could not handle. OneStream has a really good structure around it. We believe it's a much better fit for a Global company of our size. We're just scratching a surface of what the system capabilities are.

Incentivized

Sage BPC is very much ahead of Dimensions in multiple areas. The speed and ease of reporting with Sage is very good when compared (although the bank reconciliation task is one thing that i feel is much more effort on Sage and takes more time than previous). We selected SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) as we have multiple foreign entities and a team in India producing reports so needed one package that could reliably provide information in one currency and show it clearly.

Incentivized

• Customers have moved from multiple EPM systems as well as multiple EPM applications to OneStream.
• Their ROI has been quite high as lesser admins are required, no need to move data back & forth, no need for an additional dashboarding / BI tool, once a user is on OneStream can leverage it for more than 50+ use cases at no additional license cost.
• Automation, direct integration, scheduling, complex calculation capabilities, all help to further improve ROI and free up the time for the team to do value-adding tasks.
• Last but not the least is the confidence on the numbers is much higher.

• When originally implemented (as the predecessor product Outlooksoft) BPC took ASU from trying to budget and forecast for a 2B enterprise out of spreadsheets and into a far more consolidated tool. It has saved us considerable time over the years and paid for itself several times over.
• BPC also allows us to present our budget in multiple different views to support management, board and departmental reporting.

Incentivized