Enabling innovation at Renewi with a cloud CPM solution

Renewi PLC is a leading waste-to-product business collecting and recycling waste to energy and fuel, paper, metal, plastic, glass, woodchips compost and other products. Of the 14 million tons of waste handled per year, 89% is either recycled or used for energy recovery. The organisation operates in the Netherlands, Belgium, UK, France and Portugal and is headquartered in Milton Keynes UK.

With more than 7,000 employees, operating through five business units and formed from the result of a merger, Renewi was faced with the challenge of integrating two sets of reporting processes and two legacy CPM systems: Infor PM10 and Longview. With six main data sources, Renewi was spending too much time manually managing data. The company was in urgent need of a solid tool to streamline statutory and management reporting.

Renewi had a desire for simplicity, while also fulfilling their need to manage complexity and change. Core requirements for the project included aligning group-wide processes and practices and designing an integrated data model with multi-dimensional analysis. 

“Our CPM systems and processes were not fit for the future — both were dated, cumbersome and inefficient,” said John Wiericx, Reporting Manager for the Benelux region at Renewi. “Creating full consolidated group numbers was a very manual process, and we had limited support for budgets and forecasts and analysis.”

The solution

Renewi was in search of a state-of-the-art CPM solution to support the reporting needs of the entire organisation. They required a powerful tool that would bring together group reporting for all business units in one system, providing adequate and timely financial information for internal and external reporting, both actual and forecasted (budget / QMR), with a view to extend to strategy- and driver-based budgeting. We also needed to optimise reporting processes to create better insights and save time. 

After evaluating a number of other vendors, they chose OneStream over CCH Tagetik, with Concentric as the implementation partner. After speaking with real OneStream users, Renewi was thrilled about the positive feedback in relation to strategic fit, functional relevance, ease of use and implementation experience.

A co-build approach was adopted with Concentric working alongside the customer team to deliver the solution. The first phase of the project focused on management reporting and adhoc analysis. This included group, divisional and regional reporting with the capability for comparatives against budget and forecast. OneStream was set up for analysis by cost center, intercompany matching and eliminations, and direct data loads from Renewi’s six source systems.

Key benefits: 

• Single solution for group reporting.
• Faster, more detailed management and financial reporting.
• Streamlined monthly close process with guided workflows to improve control and auditability.
• Fewer data integration points across the systems landscape.

The results: 

With OneStream, Renewi has enabled greater efficiencies across their finance organisation. They have enhanced business insights with group and divisional reporting from one single source. And visibility of the close cycle has dramatically improved through entity workflows and submission statuses. 

"The entire close cycle is visible, enabling the head office to step in and ensure bottlenecks that happened before no longer delay the close. The user feedback has been very positive. We now have a single truth on the state of the business." - John Wiericx, Reporting Manager, Benelux

A core element of Renewi’s new reporting system is the Guided Workflow functionality. This has enabled Renewi to push responsibility away from the head office and onto its reporting sites. Concentric set up workflows to link tasks to the appropriate user interfaces, governing user rights and security. 

Reporting processes are now defined centrally with local autonomy through a newly designed global chart of accounts. The global chart of accounts sets the group standard with constraints applied that filter the analysis codes to the relevant divisions. Best of all, system or data changes are now easily visible on audit reports.

“The audit controls and reporting enable us to track any changes made to the system centrally or map changes made remotely,” said Wiericx. “Head office can now audit all data and system changes centrally. We can accept or remediate those changes if they don’t align with Group policies.”

With respect to systems landscape, OneStream has provided a much simpler, more streamlined integration approach. OneStream easily integrates with all data sources to streamline the upload process while automating cashflow and FX entries. Group-wide intercompany eliminations are automatically occurring in OneStream through a collaborative intercompany matching environment.

Future scope

Though their initial focus was on the challenge of merging two sizeable finance organisations, Renewi is keen to expand their use of OneStream and take advantage of the core platform and MarketPlace solutions.

“OneStream is an integrated platform for consolidation and reporting, financial forecasting and provides the possibilities to cover additional functionality in the future,” said Wiericx. “The MarketPlace enables us to add capabilities without disruption to existing project deliverables. It is really appealing to me. During the Splash Madrid conference, I noticed the opportunities of the Accounts Reconciliation solution, which is an area we are going to explore in the next couple of months. I’m looking forward to doing that.” 

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