102: Taking Inventory of Finance at Retail Companies

Welcome to the CPM Customer Success Podcast, where we help office of finance leaders enable an exact solution to enhance their corporate performance. Without spending countless nights and weekends in the office. Hi, I'm your host, Andy Smetana from Nova Advisory. Nova Advisory is a 100% OneStream professional services diamond implementation partner.

We help OneStream customers and prospective OneStream customers get the most out of their OneStream investments. For CPM customer Success listeners, we now have a weekly email newsletter to keep you informed on the latest CPM customer success news by subscribing today. We'll keep you informed on episode releases, including customer success stories. OneStream interviews and capabilities to keep you up to date about one Stream's unified platform for finance.

You can check that out now at Nova Advisory's website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast newsletter today. Today we're diving into the reality of retail, finance, and operations and why so many teams feel like they're constantly one step behind. We'll unpack the core challenges that retail organizations are dealing with right now, and then we'll walk through two real world CPM customer success stories that show what happens when those challenges are addressed the right way.

Let's start with the big picture, though. Retail businesses are operating in a constant state of change. Consumer demands shift quickly. Supply chains are unpredictable.

Pricing pressures are everywhere, and margins are tighter than ever. Now. Layer on top of that, the expectations placed on finance, the teams expected to provide real time insights, support, operational decisions, and guide pricing, inventory, and growth strategy. The problem is most finance environments weren't built for that.

One of the biggest challenges we see at no advisory is fragmented data and retail organizations often have one system for their point of sales. They have another system for their inventory. They've got multiple ERPs across the regions, or they've acquired organizations with various ERPs, and they ended up with separate tools for planning and reporting as well. So when finance needs a full picture of the business, they're pulling data from everywhere, and then they're stitching it together manually.

That leads directly into the second challenge, time lost to data preparation. Instead of analyzing performance, teams are stuck gathering, cleansing, and reconciling their data, and by the time the numbers are ready, they're already outdated. We see this clearly in large retail environments. Then there's an issue of limited visibility into what's actually driving business performance.

Retail leaders need to understand which stores are underperforming. Which products are eroding their margins and how promotions are impacting profitability. But when data lives in disconnected systems, getting those answers quickly or confidently is incredibly difficult. Another major challenge we see is the disconnect between finance and operations.

Operation teams are making daily decisions about their inventory levels, their store performance, and promotions. Meanwhile, finance is working off consolidated, often delayed data. So instead of operating from a shared view of their business, teams are reacting to different versions of reality. And finally, there's the issue that quietly causes the most pain, manual processes and reconciliations, at many retail organizations.

These critical processes are still handled in Excel. When you step back, none of these problems are surprising. Retail has evolved faster than the system supporting it. But what does better actually look like?

At a high level leading retail organizations are moving towards a much more unified approach. Instead of managing financial close planning, reporting, and reconciliations across separate tools, they're bringing everything together into a single platform like OneStream. It's an operating model shift because when your data is unified and your processes are automated, a few things happen. First, you get a single source of truth.

Finance and operations are no longer debating whose numbers are correct. Everyone's working from the same data. Second, you dramatically reduce manual work tasks like consolidations, reconciliations and reporting become system driven instead of spreadsheet driven. And third, you gain speed and flexibility.

Forecast can be updated more frequently. Scenarios can be modeled quickly, and insights are available when they're actually useful. We see this play out clearly in the CPM customer success stories we're about to talk about. So let's start with a company we'll call Warehouse Incorporated.

This is a great example of what happens when complexity quietly builds over time. Warehouse Inc. Is a global retail organization operating more than 800 warehouses across multiple continents. Like many large retailers, their finance environment evolved piece by piece.

They're running multiple ERP systems using legacy consolidation tools like Hyperion and relying heavily on Excel and other reporting platforms to fill the gaps. At one point, the reporting process included over 90 spreadsheets across internal and external reporting. Now, spreadsheets aren't the problem by themselves. The problem is what comes with them.

You've got version control issues, manual data movement, and a constant need to reconcile numbers across systems over time. That creates layers of complexity that slow everything down. Even though Warehouse Inc had a relatively fast closed process, which is around a day and a half. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain reporting required significant manual effort and reviewing results meant digging through multiple files and systems to understand what was actually happening.

At the same time, the business was growing more locations, more data, more users. The existing system simply wasn't designed to scale at that level, so they made a decision that a lot of organizations eventually face instead of continuing to patch the process. They replaced the foundation. They implemented one stream across financial close, consolidation, reporting and planning.

They built a unified system where financial results, budgets, and forecasts all live together. Data flows directly from source systems into a standardized model, and users across the organization can interact with that data in a consistent way. More than 4,000 users globally are now entering budget data directly into the platform. That's a massive shift from decentralized spreadsheets to a controlled guided process.

But the real story is what changed day to day? Cash flow reporting, which previously took five to seven days and relied on complex Excel workbooks that could fail or crash. They're now handled directly in the system with automated roll forwards. Warehouse managers who used to struggle with budgeting tools now have intuitive dashboards and guided workflows that make it easier to input and understand their numbers.

And across the finance team, about 25% of time has been reallocated from manual work to value added analysis, better decisions made with better data at the right time. For our second CPM customer success story for this week, let's take a look at a company we'll call Maverick Tools, which highlights a different but equally important side of retail finance. This is a hundred year old retailer with a global footprint. They operate across wholesale, retail, and service lines with thousands of stores worldwide.

Their main challenge was control and visibility. Particularly around account reconciliations. Before modernizing the reconciliation process was entirely Excel based. Teams were manually preparing and storing reconciliations, often saving files to local networks, which made it difficult to maintain consistency or transparency.

If someone needed to validate a balance, they often had to pull a screenshot from SAP as supporting evidence. Status tracking was manual, which meant compliance teams had to spend time chasing updates and verifying progress. And when it came time for audits, the process became even more complex. Teams had to manually compile and provide reconciliation documentation to their external auditors, which created additional workloads and increased the risk of errors.

By working with Nova Advisory to implement one stream for account reconciliations, Maverick tools fundamentally changed how the process worked. Reconciliations are now fully integrated into their financial system with balances automatically tied back to their ERP data instead of static spreadsheets. Balances update continuously throughout their close process. Even hourly in some cases, which gives their teams real time visibility into where things stand.

The platform also provides built-in audit reporting, eliminating the need to gather supporting documentation manually. One of the more interesting outcomes is how much unnecessary work was eliminated. The system automatically identifies accounts with no activity or zero balances, meaning about 20% of reconciliations require no action at all. That's a significant reduction in effort, especially at scale, just as important.

The process is now transparent and auditable from end to end. No more chasing files, no more relying on screenshots. No more guessing where things stand. When you look at these stories.

The takeaway is pretty straightforward. Retail finance struggles when the environment has outgrown the system, supporting it, whether it's a global retailer simplifying a complex reporting environment or a long established organization bringing structure to manual processes. The pattern is the same. When you unify your data, automate the work that slows you down and give teams real time visibility, everything changes.

Finance stops chasing numbers, and starts driving the business. Thanks for joining us for this episode of CPM Customer Success Reminder to check out the CPM Customer Success Weekly email newsletter to stay informed of the latest CPM customer success episodes and OneStream News. You can check that out now at the Nova Advisory website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast email newsletter today.

Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you next week for another episode of CPM, customer Success.