RS Group Turns Financial Challenges into Achievements

Setting the Ambition in Finance to Drive Opportunity

“Our driver-led forecast in OneStream allows us to have a better and timelier understanding of the change a key driver will have on the rest of the financials,” said Antonin Abauzit, Head of Group Finance Systems at RS Group. “For example, a change in revenue will automatically update the cost of sales, freight, inventory, trade receivables, inventory trade payables, intercompany purchases, etc for all the relevant entities after running a consolidation. Before we would have had to run a full 3 weeks forecasting cycle for all entities to get an answer. ”

An international products and service solutions provider based in London, England, RS Group is a publicly listed organization and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. RS Group stands out for its purpose-oriented, high-performing culture which prides itself on the organization’s ability to adapt to challenges. However, the need to speed up and automate financial reporting and forecasting led RS Group to make a change.

The organization’s previous consolidation and reporting solution provided limited capabilities and – at the same time – it was going out of support. In addition, the forecasting process was in need of a revamp to improve accuracy, traceability and coherence. RS Group used a quarterly forecasting methodology based on the financial year, which was handled on multiple disperse spreadsheets. This left Group Finance with little to no insight into where the numbers came from.

RS Group needed a solution fit for a publicly listed organization. That’s when they embarked on a true finance transformation journey with a scalable platform built to support a fast-growing global business.

Delivering a Brilliant Experience Starts with Robust Finance Capabilities

RS Group went out looking for a solution that could help them embrace regulatory requirements with confidence. Like many other companies, the journey started with the need to replace legacy software. But they wanted more.

The new solution had to cover consolidation, reporting and advanced forecasting capabilities. The solution also had to scale and provide flexibility to cater for the changing market conditions. They found that OneStream was uniquely positioned to meet these requirements, and more.

“Our driver-led forecast in OneStream allows us to have a better and timelier understanding of the change a key driver will have on the rest of the financials. For example, a change in revenue will automatically update the cost of sales, freight, inventory, trade receivables, inventory trade payables, intercompany purchases, etc for all the relevant entities after running a consolidation. Before we would have had to run a full 3 weeks forecasting cycle for all entities to get an answer.”Antonin Abauzit | Head of Group Finance Systems | RS Group

As the RS Group team embarked on the transformation journey, their business conditions changed with the pandemic. The financial consolidation piece had been implemented shortly before the lockdown as a core capability to provide auditability and control. However, with the pandemic, the implementation approach was completely revisited – starting from P&L first, then followed by cash flow.

The platform flexibility and the incremental delivery approach let RS Group evolve from a quarterly end of the financial year forecast to a rolling 18-month process. RS Group now has the flexibility to create rolling forecasts for iterative planning as well as longer range forecasts, to anchor financial targets.

As Trevor Ainslie explained, “It’s very flexible. Once you’ve got a viewpoint on how you may want to change your methodology of forecasting, OneStream enabled us to adapt based on our current change of direction.”

RS Group is now managing consolidation, budgeting, forecasting and reporting a single platform with a consistent data model and quality. With OneStream, the organization now has:

• improved control on the data,
• the flexibility to get back to any number,
• a robust audit trail that rationalizes the data input,
• and the ability to track changes throughout the data lineage.
  
  

Regarding functionality and layout, the solution is standardized, which facilitates consistent training for the business users. Further, the Excel add-in utility enables users to leverage Excel, manipulate data, and push it back into the data model. “For an end user, it’s not something completely different to what they’re used to, but it just allows us to have more control,” said Trevor Ainslie.

Empowering Finance for Tomorrow’s Evolution

RS Group runs Finance with confidence, thanks to the standardization, auditability and data quality that OneStream provides. “OneStream is a great mechanism to pull data and view it how you want. Standardization allows users to get to that line of sight from a group viewpoint, and down to an individual business unit. And being able to tally the two views up is one of the biggest benefits. Now the users can truly understand the numbers up and down the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow,” explained Trevor Ainslie.

Faster Consolidation and Forecasts

Finally, OneStream empowers the Finance teams to be more independent. “Now I can ask someone in the team to make a change, add a new business, new reporting, or a new way of forecasting. We no longer need to ask IT; we manage everything within Finance,” explained Antonin Abauzit.

When we asked Antonin about his favourite thing in OneStream he responded: “I like the Quick View because for the end user this is a fantastic tool. If an end user gets a report, but doesn’t know where the number is from, they can leverage Quick View and then slice and dice the data to drill down to the source. For an accountant, that’s the dream.”