From HFM to What's Next: 5 Finance Leaders Who Made the Move, and What They Found on the Other Side

The conversation about the future of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) has persisted long enough that most Finance leaders have heard the arguments. For instance, Oracle has shifted its investment toward Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). Upgrades are also painful and expensive. Not to mention, the suite of products wasn't built for the kind of agile, unified reporting that modern Finance teams are expected to deliver. You get it – you already know these arguments.

What's harder to find is honest, ground-level evidence of what actually happens when organizations pull the trigger. Not the vendor pitch decks, but the real story: what drove the decision, where organizations were struggling, and whether the outcomes were worth it.

This blog post focuses on that evidence.

Specifically, we looked at five organizations that migrated from HFM to OneStream, spanning manufacturing, food production, retail, and beyond. Each came to the decision from a different place:

• Terex was facing a costly HFM and Financial Data Management (FDM) upgrade and needed to sync two separate systems for consolidation and planning. The company chose OneStream to keep everything in one system.
• Bühler AG was concerned about the future of HFM and was dealing with increasing system crashes during month-end, so staying put was no longer viable.
• Fruit of the Loom suffered from chronic HFM downtime during period-end close, and a prohibitively expensive upgrade cycle forced the company to find an alternative.
• Costco’s HFM could no longer be upgraded and required a full reimplementation, so the company used the situation as an opportunity to replace HFM with something better.
• Nutreco found its legacy HFM system and surrounding processes couldn't keep pace with growing reporting requirements. As a result, Finance was buried in manual work and at risk of tax non-compliance.

These organizations’ experiences aren't identical. But the through line is consistent: Finance leaders who treated the process as a business transformation — not an IT migration — came out ahead. While the organizations who didn't also have cautionary tales worth hearing, we’ve focused on the lessons learned from the five organizations listed above.

Here's what they learned.

https://www.onestream.com/resources/terex/ 

Terex Corporation is a global manufacturer of lifting and material processing products with nearly $5 billion in revenue.

To replace a fragmented landscape of legacy Finance systems (e.g. Oracle HFM, FDM, Prophix, and multiple Excel-based tools) Terex selected OneStream's unified platform. The company had been struggling with over 1,000 entities, 15,000+ consolidation rules, and an 18- to 20-hour monthly close process. Meanwhile, the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams were hamstrung by limited dimensionality and heavily manual planning workflows across different segments.

The decision to use OneStream was based on the benefits of a unified platform for both consolidation and planning in one system. Two key benefits for OneStream were strong customer references that were "100% positive" and the ability to deploy on Microsoft Azure.

After implementing OneStream for consolidation, reporting, and planning simultaneously, the results were dramatic:

• Full consolidation now completes in under 15 minutes.
• Reporting entities were streamlined from 1,000 down to 140.
• 85 automated workflows replaced manual steps across budgeting and close.

Now, 97% of entities load directly from 28 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The Corporate Finance team thus gained a single source of truth and the flexibility to extend the platform as the business grows.

"The OneStream platform has provided significant cost savings opportunities throughout our organization. Terex replaced multiple systems with a single, unified solution that handles consolidations, reporting, budgeting and planning and can be extended to address additional needs going forward."

– Jon Paterson, VP, Financial Planning and Analysis, Terex

https://www.onestream.com/resources/buhler/ 

Bühler AG is a 164-year-old Swiss technology company operating across 140 countries.

Since 2009, the company had been running financial consolidation for 90 global business units on Oracle HFM. Performance issues were increasingly causing system crashes and login failures during month-end. Then Oracle's decision to stop further development of HFM in favour of cloud solutions forced Bühler to evaluate the alternatives.

The decision was based on what best fit with the company’s IT setup. The company needed flexibility to map current and future requirements and seamless SAP S/4 HANA integration. With the unified OneStream platform, Bühler could eliminate the need for multiple separate systems and extensible dimension structure without complex workarounds.

After a carefully phased implementation, OneStream eliminated the system instability:

• Crashes no longer happen.
• The month-end close is significantly faster.
• Business users can run consolidation workflows in minutes without relying on the central team.
• The self-service reload feature has dramatically reduced support overhead.

Now, Bühler plans to fully automate SAP S/4 HANA data flow into OneStream and use drill-back capabilities to access transaction-level detail directly from consolidated figures.

"The implementation of OneStream has made the month-end close process much more efficient. With HFM, responsibility for critical tasks lay with the consolidation team, which often led to bottlenecks and a heavy workload. Thanks to OneStream's flexibility and user-friendliness, various processes have been automated and simplified, significantly reducing the need for support."

— Luciana Circelli, Consolidation Application Expert, Bühler AG

https://www.onestream.com/resources/fruit-of-the-loom/ 

Fruit of the Loom is a Berkshire Hathaway company with nearly 30,000 employees across 26 countries.

For three years, the company had been running financial consolidation on Oracle HFM. Then mounting compatibility issues, system downtime during critical close periods, and costly upgrade cycles pushed the Finance team to look elsewhere. The stakes were high: Any instability in the system directly threatened the integrity of financial results.

The decision to use OneStream was based on several factors:

• The functionality of the software
• The ability to extend into budgeting, planning, and account reconciliations via OneStream Solution Exchange.
• Confidence in OneStream leadership and their understanding of customer requirements and how a cloud deployment removes the infrastructure burden from the Finance team.

With a two-person team, Fruit of the Loom went live on OneStream in just 6 months and saw meaningful results:

• System reliability improved dramatically: as Financial Systems Manager John Alsobrook put it, "OneStream is always up."
• Cash flow reporting became automated
• Team gained the extensibility to expand into budgeting, planning, and account reconciliations without adding new systems.

Now, the platform manages over 2.9 billion data points. That number is 100 times what HFM handled across 137 legal entities, 353 locations, and 195 brand codes, with automated intercompany eliminations across 8 currencies.

"We no longer have to worry about the system being down during the period-end close. I'm not losing sleep or getting calls in the middle of the night to address system issues. OneStream is always up!"

— John Alsobrook, Financial Systems Manager, Fruit of the Loom

https://www.onestream.com/resources/costco/ 

Across four continents, Costco Wholesale operates 800 warehouses.

Costco was running financial close and reporting across a patchwork of SAP and i-Series ERPs, Oracle HFM, Cognos BI, and more than 90 Excel spreadsheets. When HFM could no longer be upgraded and required a full reimplementation, the team evaluated the options and chose OneStream over SAP BPC. OneStream’s flexibility and how well the platform aligned with Costco’s requirements were deciding factors.

The decision followed OneStream outperforming SAP BPC in a direct evaluation on flexibility and fit with business requirements:

• The ability to scale to 4,000 budget users with guided analytics.
• Drill-through to SAP ERP for warehouse-level managers.
• A single system of record across close, reporting, and planning.

The OneStream implementation delivered a single system of record for close, consolidation, P&L reporting, budgeting, and cashflow. Through that system, guided analytics were rolled out to 4,000 warehouse managers worldwide. Here are the results:

• 25% of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) time reallocated from manual work to analysis
• 3 days shifted from data preparation to insight
• A cash flow process that previously took 5 – 7 days in a crash-prone Excel workbook now gets completed entirely within OneStream with automated roll-forwards.

Now the Finance team have one place to see all their financial data, spending more time on financial statement review and less time on manual creation and review work.

"From a financial reporting perspective, we needed to focus on the work, and a lot of time was spent manipulating spreadsheets in the past. Now that everything is in OneStream and things are automated, we can produce timely reports, make changes visible, and better support reviews."

— Courtney Stricklin, AVP of Global Financial Reporting, Costco

https://www.onestream.com/resources/nutreco/ 

Nutreco is a Dutch animal nutrition and fish feed producer with €9 billion in annual revenue.

As the company struggled with fragmented, manual reporting processes, Finance teams were drowning in spreadsheets and at risk of tax non-compliance. Business units each ran their own Excel-based supply chain key performance indicators (KPIs). Planning was also entirely manual, and the legacy system couldn't capture the level of detail management reporting required.

The decision to move to OneStream was based on several company needs:

• The ability to run a wide range of processes in a single platform
• Extensibility to cover future reporting requirements, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and tax.
• More flexible dimensionality to capture granular data the previous system couldn't handle.

OneStream met those requirements and more. After the migration, here are the results Nutreco achieved:

• Cut the close process from 8 days to 5.
• Reduced CapEx reporting effort by 50%.
• Reduced accounting errors by 33%.
• Eliminated reporting deadline overruns entirely.
• Reduced the tax-reporting process from one week to under an hour.

Now, Nutreco can run 28 solutions — including close, consolidation, ESG, tax, supply chain, and task management — on a single platform.

"The one phrase I would use to describe OneStream is 'great business value' — being able to extend the number of reporting processes in the platform provides a much more structured way of working. We can look at the data with more transparency to see where there may be data quality issues."

— Wilna Lindeman, Manager of Financial Information Systems, Nutreco

Across these very different industries, the story is remarkably consistent. Each of these organizations had outgrown their legacy Finance systems, whether through rapid growth, increasing complexity, or solutions that simply couldn't keep up. The cost of staying was becoming greater than the cost of change.

What the organizations found in OneStream wasn't just a like-for-like replacement. By unifying consolidation, planning, reporting, and beyond into a single unified platform, each company eliminated the fragmentation that had been slowing Finance. The companies then redirected the reclaimed time and resources toward better insights, analysis, and decision-making. And the outcomes speak for themselves:

• Costco empowered 4,000 warehouse managers with self-service budgeting.
• Terex cut down a potential 20-hour consolidation to just 15 minutes.
• Nutreco finally hit every reporting deadline.

Now, the question for any Finance leader still running on aging HFM solutions and/or other siloed systems isn't whether change is needed. Leaders instead need to ask how much longer the status quo can be justified.

Take the first step toward redefining what your Finance function can do beyond HFM by reading our ebook: Oracle EPM: Free Is Not Always Free. Ready to see OneStream in action? Visit our website to schedule a demo and explore how we can help your organization unleash its full potential.