About Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro Inc. a Delaware corporation (“Ingram Micro”) is one of the world’s largest technology distributors. Ingram Micro helps businesses realize the promise of technology. It delivers customized global information technology solutions to Ingram Micro’s vendor, reseller, and retailer partners, which enables these partners to provide excellent business outcomes to the companies and consumers they serve. Deep expertise in technology solutions, mobility, cloud, and supply chain solutions enables business partners to operate efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve. Unrivaled agility, deep market insights and the trust and dependability that come from decades of proven relationships set Ingram Micro apart and ahead. Discover how Ingram Micro can help you realize the promise of technology. More at Ingrammicro.com.

The Challenge

Irvine, CA-based Ingram Micro employs over 29K people and has annual revenue of approximately $54B. Historically, Ingram Micro has had an extensive Oracle Hyperion footprint for financial consolidation, budgeting, and management reporting, which included Hyperion Financial Management (HFM), Hyperion Planning, Essbase, and Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM). In addition, Ingram Micro was using Trintech for account reconciliations and Qlik for reporting.

Challenged by a complex environment of fragmented solutions, the speed of profitability allocations was the main driver for Ingram Micro to replace the Hyperion suite. Managing margins, profitability, and impact on working capital are critical success factors for the company, but Ingram Micro has many ERP systems, with different instances around the world. This made it difficult to get the data from those systems into their profitability solution. Meanwhile, financial reporting was also an issue. Countries were waiting between two and four hours after posting a journal in the general ledger to see the data in Hyperion.

“We have an annual CFO conference where financial directors from all countries came together in Irvine,” said Jan de Leeuw, Director of Financial Systems at Ingram Micro. “Normally I present there, and I was always apologizing about challenges with our data in Hyperion. It felt like nobody was happy with me during the first three years that I was working in this role. We needed a better way to understand profitability for a customer to evaluate new opportunities.”

Making the Move to OneStream

Ingram Micro operates globally in 61 countries, with approximately 200 entities. Concerned about their profitability solution, Ingram Micro was careful in their decision to explore the market. Initially the company tried the Oracle EPM Cloud solution, but upon testing saw that it resulted in a very slow allocation process, and the numbers didn’t reconcile.

“Oracle simply couldn’t handle our performance needs — it was not the right solution for Ingram,” said de Leeuw. “From there we had many conversations with OneStream about the solution’s ability to handle large volumes of data. We looked at our current processes and future goals and felt confident that OneStream could handle it. We put a lot of trust in OneStream and took a step in the dark, which in the end was very successful. We have a high boosted environment right now with over 1,000 users currently, which is expected to grow to 1,100 by the end of the year.”

Ingram Micro went live with OneStream in the Microsoft Azure cloud for financial consolidation and budgeting in 2021. Extending their investment, Ingram Micro added People Planning, Capital Planning, and Account Reconciliation solutions from the OneStream MarketPlace. Ingram Micro will go live with profitability in OneStream in Q4 2022.

Instead of having a delivery partner build the OneStream solution on behalf of Ingram Micro, the project was managed by Ingram Micro’s own Financial Systems & Processes team; the team was supplemented with consultants from OneStream’s implementation partner, Bart & Partners, and supported by OneStream Services.

Streamlined Financial Operations

With Hyperion, everything was batch driven because of Ingram Micro’s complex ERP landscape. They were pushing the data every two hours into Hyperion which created many delays with consolidation and management reporting. Now, it is an on-demand process where users can push that data in whenever the country is ready. This has shortened the timeline between the journal posting in the ERP to it landing in the consolidation system from two hours to five minutes.

“In Europe we have a central purchasing organization with a lot of intercompany transactions taking place and we’ve already seen an improvement managing this activity. I also think the OneStream dashboarding is strong, with the ability to give every country one standard way of starting their analysis, plus the ability to play with the data for their own needs,” said de Leeuw. “On the budgeting side, we are leveraging OneStream for the annual budget, quarterly forecasting, and some monthly forecasting. We look forward to implementing weekly forecast soon.”

A Modern Profitability Model

To run allocations for the US was a lengthy process in Hyperion, and sometimes failed, said de Leeuw, “We had millions of records pushing into our profitability tool and 37 ways to define how it should be allocated, so it was a monster.” On top of that, Ingram Micro wanted to base management reporting on the line of businesses, which are rolled up from a vendor and product category perspective.

With more than 170K customers and 1,500 vendor partners, Ingram Micro built dashboards that provide users simplified access to profitability information, including which customers are making up the profitability for a vendor within a given time frame. “Managing margins and profitability on one hand and the working capital on the other are two extremely important things for us. We now have much more insight into performance and profitability by customer, item, and country. It’s one of our most important instruments,” said de Leeuw.

Benefits of OneStream

The speed of allocations has significantly improved, from eight hours down to 10 – 20 minutes, and the users are extremely happy. Instead of waiting overnight, they can check the data, adjust, and complete allocations within minutes. “Rapid refresh was not possible in Hyperion, and it took 56 hours from beginning to end to run the process. We were able to reduce that process to eight hours and now users can run it whenever they want, and it takes only 20 minutes to refresh. That’s a huge game changer for everyone that’s working with the data.”

The scalability is also much improved. Onboarding new countries in the past would take three to four months to build a new application in HPCM. With OneStream the information is already there, so it’s as simple as adding the vendors and customers of that specific country and they are on board.

“There are so many things I like about OneStream,” said de Leeuw. “Speed, speed, speed, everything is faster. The users are happy and it’s easier to present. Support is fantastic, escalations are reduced to the minimum, and the technical reliability is amazing — which is something I never experienced with Hyperion. I like having the flexibility to build solutions out in the in the platform— the technology is very powerful. And the OneStream team listens and is always willing to help by continuing to develop things that that are beneficial for companies like Ingram Micro. It’s been tremendous.”

Future Plans

As Ingram Micro continues to bridge customer data to vendors on a digital level within OneStream, they are also exploring additional opportunities to automate the budget process and implement new MarketPlace solutions, like Task Manager and Application Control Manager (ACM). Ingram Micro also hopes to do 6 – 12 months trend analysis in the platform. But high on their list of plans is exploring OneStream’s Sensible Machine Learning solution.

About the Implementation Partner

Bart & Partners is a one-stop shop for EPM consultancy and support. They offer organizations a complete service package for Oracle and OneStream applications. From advice, design, and implementation, to rebuilds, maintenance, support and coaching. Whatever a company wishes in the field of financial management, planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial control, and data management, we provide the best solution. That is why we only work with highly experienced consultants, and we only do Oracle and OneStream. Smart, Simple, Solid.