Video · November 26, 2024
How Alliance Automotive unified Finance across a fast-growing acquisitions portfolio
About this video
Alliance Automotive Group, a French automotive parts distributor owned by Genuine Parts Company, faced a growing Finance challenge as frequent acquisitions brought new users, cultures, and systems into the organization. With HFM and heavy Excel reliance as their foundation, version control was unreliable and the consolidation team regularly worked weekends to keep up.
OneStream replaced that fragmented environment with a single source of truth across consolidation, reporting, and FP&A. Excel usage dropped from 80% to 20%, weekend consolidation work was eliminated entirely, and the Finance team can now compare reporting and planning data with confidence that nothing has changed since the last submission.
Speakers
Head of Project Finance | Alliance Automotive Group
Key takeaways
- Frequent acquisitions made a unified Finance platform essential, not optional. Each new acquisition brought new users and cultures. OneStream's ability to bring different environments together on one platform made it the clear choice.
- Excel usage dropped from 80% to 20% after implementing OneStream. Reducing spreadsheet dependence eliminated the version control issues that previously left Finance teams questioning which numbers were correct and when they changed.
- The consolidation team no longer works weekends at all. Moving from HFM and Excel to a single governed platform transformed close from an exhausting manual effort into a reliable, repeatable process.
- OneStream is now the single source of truth for consolidation, reporting, and FP&A data in one place. Finance teams know exactly what was reported previously and can compare across periods with complete confidence that the numbers haven't shifted.
- Alliance Automotive is extending OneStream data beyond Finance through a Power BI integration. Making financial data accessible across the entire organization, not just the Finance community, is the next step in their platform journey.
Read Full Transcript
My name is Marina Neto, Head of Project Finance at Alliance Automotive Group. We are a French company in the automotive parts distribution sector, and we belong to a US firm — the American company Genuine Parts Company.
Every year we carry out many acquisitions, which means new users and cultures join us. It is very important, both for headquarters and for the local entities, to bring the finance community within the company together.
Before OneStream, we only had one system, HFM, plus Excel on top of that. Sometimes the numbers would change. "What has happened since the last report we sent to the company?" When I first saw OneStream, I was impressed by the tool's ability to bring different environments together and unite different applications in a single platform.
I found it very interesting to also have this extensibility and all the dashboards. That's why I was convinced of OneStream's ability to serve many business units simultaneously. Now, for example, we want to work with Power BI to make all that data accessible not just to the finance community, but to all users across the company.
We have eliminated HFM and are currently not working with HFM at all. And the use of Excel has been reduced, I believe, from 80% down to 20%. The consolidation team no longer works on weekends at all.
OneStream allows us to have a single source of truth, and nothing changes. We know what we reported previously. Forget Excel, forget everything else — we have everything in OneStream and can compare reporting and consolidation data as well as FP&A data.
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