Kennametal's Implementation of OneStream for Financial Consolidation and Planning

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

• Aerospace
• Transportation

• Business Operation
• Quality Assurance

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

With an SAP HANA ERP system being used to handle transaction processing, Kennametal had been using Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), FDM, and Hyperion Planning for 15 years, but the products had been receiving little investment from Oracle and were no longer meeting the company’s requirements. The administrators of the Hyperion applications were so consumed by maintaining the products they had little time for value-added work. As they began looking for alternative solutions, it became clear the Kennametal team needed an intuitive solution that could be easily learned and navigated by users with limited support from the administrators. The team evaluated several alternatives and selected OneStream as a unified solution for financial consolidation, reporting and planning.

With over 80 years as an industrial technology leader, Kennametal, Inc. delivers productivity to customers through materials science, tooling and wear-resistant solutions. Customers across aerospace, earthworks, energy, general engineering and transportation turn to Kennametal to help them manufacture with precision and efficiency. Every day approximately 9,000 employees are helping customers in more than 60 countries stay competitive. Kennametal generated nearly $1.9 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2020.

The initial implementation of OneStream focused on replacing HFM and FDM for financial close, consolidation, reporting and account reconciliations. The second phase focused on replacing Hyperion Planning and was completed in four months, including financial, capital and sales planning. The implementation of OneStream for planning at Kennametal had to address a matrix organization structure where managers have responsibilities across multiple entities. Administrative functional leads in IT, Finance HR and other departments have global responsibility, while manufacturing controllers have single or multiple plan responsibilities within their regions. The prior forecasting process was very fluid with Microsoft Excel® used to collect data, which was uploaded into Hyperion Planning. This upload process was very time-consuming, as some users have responsibility for hundreds of cost centers. The end users requested one-stop-shopping functionality for planning and a user interface that was much easier and intuitive than in Hyperion.

• OneStream implementation partner, GID solutions, configured planning and forecasting dashboards that provided the users with intuitive data entry forms that could be used via the web interface or via Excel®. The dashboards included built-in instructions to guide users and included a mass upload template that could handle multiple cost centers at the same time.
• The planning and forecasting dashboards include targeted consolidations based on user security, as well as on-demand reporting with drill-down capabilities.
• The team also implemented administrator dashboards that provided one-stop-shopping for administering financial close, forecasting and annual planning processes. The dashboard organizes and lists out admin processes not done regularly, such as setting global time, loading FX rates, running allocations, copying scenarios and running data validations.

• Kennametal generated nearly $1.9 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2020.
• The second phase of OneStream implementation was completed in four months.
• Upgrades are now just a few hours vs. many months and at a high cost with the prior system.