Case Study
Elevating Business Through Digital Transformation
Wolfspeed is a global leader in silicon carbide technology and production. Its solutions allow for breakthroughs in various industries and applications, including renewable energy/storage and aerospace/defense. A global semiconductor powerhouse, Wolfspeed is driving the worldwide transition from silicon to silicon carbide.
12
Minutes to provide trusted data to users
2
Minutes to produce an 80-page book
30%
Cost avoidance
Benefits
- Direct integration to ERP for Finance
- Trusted, single source of truth for the business
- New efficiencies in data management, reporting and planning
- Cost avoidance in supporting future business growth
- New insights into business to help drive strategic decisions
- Unified platform that evolves and scales with business
Industry
Technology – Semiconductors
Location
North Carolina, United States
Solutions
- Account Reconciliations
- Close & Consolidations
- Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting
- Profitability Analysis
- Reporting & Analytics
Creating a Long-term Vision for Digital Excellence
Wolfspeed was looking for strategies to enhance organizational efficiency and provide better services for growth. In response, the leadership team created a long-term vision of digital transformation to improve reporting and analytics, planning, close and consolidations, and much more.
Businesses Challenges
- Heavy reliance on Excel®
- Little standardization and automation
- Reporting, planning and close processes heavily reliant on a few individuals
- Disparate systems that had to be pulled together
- Lack of structure to support significant scale and growth
Bringing the Vision to Life
Wolfspeed had basic and limited applications in place, processes that were labor-intensive and a lack of standardization and structure. The company was ready for strategic transformation.
To kickstart the digital transformation journey, Wolfspeed focused on implementing necessary solutions. For example, the team at WolfSpeed embarked on parallel implementations of SAP for the ERP system and OneStream for all CPM needs. Within the OneStream platform, the team prioritized planning as their initial phase, followed by consolidated reporting and then account reconciliations.
This strategic approach yielded substantial efficiency improvements, uncovered valuable business insights and allowed for scalability.
Achieving Substantial Efficiencies
The journey we are on is from spending 80% of our time compiling and 20% analyzing – to flip the needle to the opposite side, where we want our analysts focused on driving business execution.”– David Fritz | Vice President | Financial Planning Analysis & Financial Systems
Given the need to remove the reliance on manual data pulls and consolidations throughout the day, the team was focused on improving speed and scalability. The team accomplished that goal by establishing a direct connection between OneStream and SAP, enabling the automatic retrieval of actuals and consolidating in just 12 minutes.
That transformation ensured users had access to timely and reliable data. Not to mention, reporting processes became highly automated, allowing the team to generate an 80-page book in less than three minutes with the push of a button.
Unlocking Business Insights
To unlock business insights, Wolfspeed needed to conduct in-depth customer and product profitability analyses at a highly detailed level. However, when attempting to meet these requirements within SAP, the team encountered challenges, so they looked to OneStream for this capability.
Utilizing OneStream’s unique BI Blend capabilities, Wolfspeed could import all the desired attributes for each product, even with a substantial volume of records, without affecting system performance. The team then leveraged dashboards to quickly view key product and customer metrics. Plus, the team could now easily manipulate the data based on various attributes to extract new, valuable insights that would have otherwise never materialized.
It is about costs avoidance – where we would have had to grow and add, say, 30% more people to be able to do the reporting and analytics that we now have in place today to better run the business– David Fritz | Vice President | Financial Planning Analysis & Financial Systems
Delivering Tangible Business Value
“We’re changing the way that the company works. And that’s right back to efficiency, how people do their jobs, how they spend their time. And that’s ultimately what it’s all about.”
– David Fritz | Vice President | Financial Planning Analysis & Financial Systems
Continuing Growth and Innovation
OneStream brings substantial value to Wolfspeed through enhanced efficiency and scalability. That value comes from optimizing where people spend their time, so they don’t have to add cost to effectively support business growth over time. Now, the Wolfspeed team has the time to do more meaningful analysis and not just manage data.
"We’re so excited about the platform because you know it’s going to continue to expand and evolve with use cases and how we intend to use it."
– David Fritz | Vice President | Financial Planning Analysis & Financial Systems