106: Better Bandwidth for Finance Teams in Media & Communications

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 talking about how media and communication companies can simplify finance operations, improve their forecasting, and create a stronger foundation for long-term growth. We're gonna cover the most common challenges these companies face and share two CPM customer success stories. We have a lot to cover, so let's get started. So media and communication companies rarely operate in simple environments. They're managing things like subscription revenue, advertising revenue, licensing deals, regional entities, international reporting, acquisitions, headcount planning, operations, reporting. You get the idea. That creates a very specific kind of finance challenge because finance is expected to connect all of it, not just report the numbers. They're expected to explain them, trust them, and help leadership decide what happens next. That usually creates three major challenges. The first challenge is fragmented financial data. This is the most common issue these organizations face. Different business units use different systems. Different departments define their metrics differently. Different leaders trust different reports. Operations has one number. FP&A has another. Without a centralized source of truth, reporting becomes slower, it's harder, it's far less reliable. Finance teams spend more time validating numbers than analyzing them, and that becomes expensive because finance should be helping the business move forward, not spending half the month trying to figure out whose spreadsheet is the correct one. Second challenge is forecasting that feels like guesswork. Forecasting in media and communications is rarely static. Consumer behavior changes quickly. Subscriber growth shifts. Advertising revenue moves and launch dates change. Usage patterns evolve. If your planning process depends on static annual budgeting and slow monthly reporting, the business moves faster than finance can respond. Leaders need rolling forecasts, scenario planning, driver-based planning, and faster reforecasting. Forecasting should support decisions, not create more uncertainty. Challenge three, governance gets messy. As companies grow, finance complexity usually shows up in places people don't notice immediately. Security models become harder to manage. Metadata expands. Workflow ownership gets blurry, and approvals become inconsistent. Suddenly, nobody knows who owns what, who approves what, which report is current, or why one process requires eleven manual steps and three follow-up emails. This creates real risk. Poor governance slows the close, weakens trust, and makes scale harder than it should be. Finance without strong governance is just controlled chaos. That brings us to our first CPM customer success story for this week. We're going to call this company Project Phoenix. Project Phoenix is a leading interactive entertainment and global technology company operating complex global digital platforms at a massive scale. As the company continued to grow, the finance organization needed a more governed, scalable approach to planning, forecasting, and analytics. But the business has evolved, so the platform needed to evolve with it. Some of the challenges look familiar. Increasing complexity in workflows, growing metadata management issues, security models that needed stronger structure, underutilized capabilities and opportunities to improve FP&A and forecasting. This is common in fast-growing organizations. Nova Advisory partnered with Project Phoenix as both a strategic advisor and a delivery partner. They already had a production OneStream environment in place, so the first step was a health assessment. This included a detailed review of their architecture and cube design, workflow configurations, their metadata, dimension usage, security and data cell access models, their integration practices, and overall usability across the environment. The goal was to create a practical roadmap for improvement without disrupting their day-to-day business operations. This assessment Identified opportunities to simplify workflows, improve security design, rationalize metadata, and better align the platform with OneStream's leading practices. From there, Nova also supported Project Phoenix's FP&A go-live and forecasting enhancements. This included forecast process improvements, dashboard and reporting solutions, and process refinements designed to improve efficiency and adoption. This created the confidence the finance team was after. They had confidence in the process, confidence in the numbers, confidence that forecasting is actually helping decision-making instead of slowing it down. Nova Advisory also helped define a long-term roadmap for expansion into financial close & consolidations, account reconciliations, and use of Task Manager. Their outcome was significant. Project Phoenix gained a clear understanding of their current environment, improved FP&A functionality, stronger forecasting maturity, more streamlined workflows, better security concepts, and a practical phased roadmap for continued OneStream adoption. The ability to scale without creating unnecessary complexity is what finance maturity looks like. Now let's look at our second CPM customer success story for today. We'll call this company Horizon Enterprises. Horizon is a large, diversified enterprise operating across communications, automotive, and media industries. They are dealing with growing complexity in their workflows, metadata, and security. The opportunities to improve their cash flow and pro forma design and their reporting usability had challenges. Nova Advisory came in. We conducted stakeholder interviews across multiple teams to understand how their current OneStream platform was functioning across the business. The review focused on overall application and program-level design, scenario management, data retention strategy, security model structure, cash flow and pro forma design, reporting usability, and data management efficiency. The result was a written assessment with clear prioritized recommendations for improving the performance, maintainability, and user experience. This gave leadership a practical roadmap for future investment decisions. Nova Advisory supported financial consolidations implementation, reporting and dashboard improvements, and the build of a secured custom team member cube to support workforce data with proper dimensionality and security controls. Now OneStream was supporting not just financial reporting, but operational and people analytics as well. Finance can now connect workforce decisions, operational planning, and financial outcomes all inside one governed platform. That changes executive conversations. The outcome for Horizon included a clear enterprise-level understanding of platform maturity, actionable recommendations for optimization, improved financial consolidation reporting, expanded OneStream usage across operational and people data, and a stronger foundation for scalable long-term adoption across their business divisions. Nova Advisory helped move the organization from isolated implementation thinking to enterprise program thinking. That mind shift is often the biggest transformation of all. In closing, media and communication companies don't struggle because finance teams are not capable. They struggle because complexity grows faster than the system supporting them. Eventually, even strong teams hit a ceiling. Unified systems like OneStream help remove that ceiling. They create structure where there's fragmentation, visibility where there's uncertainty, governance where there's operational drag, and scalability where growth would otherwise create friction. Whether you're a gaming company like Project Phoenix, a diversified enterprise like Horizon, or somewhere in between, finance should not feel like surviving from spreadsheet to spreadsheet. Rather, it should be the strategic engine of the business, and with the right strategy, it can be 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.