Unifying a Decentralized Business Model with One Source of Truth

Established in 1886, Berwind is a family-owned investment management company with a long history of financial stability and consistent growth in revenue and profitability. Representing several billion dollars in enterprise value, Berwind's six operating companies serve a number of industries including pharmaceutical, specialty chemical, medical packaging, automotive, life sciences, energy, general industrial, and natural resources.

“Life is definitely better. The information that we get out of OneStream is being used up the ladder. The numbers are strong, and we feel that we can rely on them. We know that we now have one source of truth.”

- Kerri Robinson, Director of Accounting and Financial Reporting, Berwind

1. Functioning with a Decentralized Business Model. 

As a fifth-generation, family-owned investment management company, Berwind has a distinguished history and a bias towards action. Functioning with a decentralized business model, Berwind’s operating companies run on their own right – with their own CEOs, CFOs, business strategies and financial systems that are specific to their business. Many different ERPs are in use, which was a pain point as the group struggled to capture the financial information required to report to the owners on how their businesses are performing.

Kerri Robinson, Director of Accounting and Financial Reporting at Berwind explains,

"One company might operate on an Oracle platform and use all Oracle products. Another company may use SAP. Our struggle is to get all the financial information from each company to the top level in a streamlined and comprehensive way.”

To accommodate deadlines, there were a lot of manual workarounds happening, and a lot of time consumed with shifting the data manually. There were also concerns amongst the team about not knowing if the numbers were completely accurate because of all these manual activities.

2. Berwind Makes the Move to the Cloud.

The Berwind team were aware that their Oracle HFM system was effectively being sunset. They knew they were going to need to move to a cloud solution to simplify their complex application architecture and improve the overall user experience. They were still operating the HFM servers on premises, which proved to be frustrating due to limitations in functionality. When there were problems with HFM, it was very difficult to get effective service. From a customer perspective, it seemed as though Oracle’s focus was elsewhere. 

The Berwind team needed more trust and transparency in the numbers. They needed one version of the truth and a unifying solution to bring together all their decentralized business units. "OneStream came in with an incredible demo. They had a lot of concrete answers for us and proved their platform could handle our complex reporting structure. They really blew it out of the park!” Robinson continued, “Our operating companies are big global manufacturing companies, and the nice thing is that when we started with consolidations and planning in OneStream, they were able to roll it out themselves and start running.”

“We can close faster, plan better, and make more informed decisions with OneStream.”

- Kerri Robinson, Director of Accounting and Financial Reporting, Berwind

3. Tackling the Three T’s - Time, Transparency, and Truth!

Berwind can now see a lot more detail in their financials – down to the operating company level, which helps with business decision making. They now have one single source of the truth, which is the biggest change from their previous system where they had different data coming from many sources and regularly had to move data between modules.

A very big win for the team was focused on fund accounting. The fund accounting for alternative investments is vastly different to other reporting. The Berwind team needed a way to track all the information and to create financial statements for specific portfolios for the family. To have this fully unified in OneStream with all the detailed fund investment management information has been really key.

Another win has been the inclusion of People and Planet reporting on OneStream. These teams are working in OneStream and getting their important metrics and reports with trust and confidence.

“The feedback from the users makes us know that we made the right decision. And we've continuously rolled out to different departments. We have Tax and Treasury using the platform and we get such good feedback from everybody involved.” 

- Kerri Robinson, Director of Accounting and Financial Reporting, Berwind

OneStream has given confidence in the numbers to the CFO, the CEO, the board and the family. All stakeholders get the information they need when they need it from OneStream. The Berwind team see many opportunities to expand their use of OneStream beyond consolidations and planning. They are examining future phases to add account reconciliations and lease accounting.

Robinson encapsulates her OneStream experience with some final words:

“We just love it so much.”