Unifying financial performance at Melrose with OneStream

Melrose Industries PLC is a London-based industrial investment company specialising in acquiring underperforming yet fundamentally strong manufacturing businesses, applying strategic management focus, operational improvements, and targeted investment to enhance their performance and long-term value. It finances acquisitions using a disciplined approach with modest leverage, focusing on sustainable value creation rather than aggressive financial engineering. Once performance improvements have been realised, Melrose divests the businesses and returns capital to shareholders, demonstrating a consistent track record of delivering shareholder value. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, Melrose oversees a portfolio of globally diversified industrial businesses.

Given Melrose’s complex business model, global portfolio and dynamic acquisition strategy, the organisation required a sophisticated and flexible solution capable of supporting dynamic financial processes and strategic decision-making.

Historically, Melrose relied on a fragmented Oracle Hyperion landscape, including Hyperion Enterprise, HFM, FDM, Essbase, and Hyperion Strategic Finance (HSF) to support consolidation, reporting, and forecasting. This complex mix of applications had evolved through multiple acquisitions and was used for both management and statutory reporting, as well as weekly and monthly treasury cash flow forecasting.

Over time, the limitations of this multi-system architecture became increasingly apparent. Finance teams were spending excessive time and effort moving, reconciling, and maintaining metadata across disparate systems, which restricted agility and increased the risk of inconsistency. Integrating newly acquired businesses was also a significant challenge, as each acquisition brought unique data structures, chart of accounts, and legacy systems that were difficult to consolidate efficiently.

After evaluating several options, OneStream emerged as the preferred solution due to its ability to replace multiple legacy systems (Hyperion Enterprise, HFM, Essbase, and Planning tools) with a single, unified platform.

This project marked Concentric’s first OneStream deployment and entailed a large-scale, multi-phase implementation delivered in close collaboration with Melrose’s finance and IT teams. The solution has provided a modern, scalable foundation for Melrose’s Corporate Performance Management, supporting greater accuracy, control, and efficiency across the Group’s financial operations.

"The quality of the team at Concentric and their technical knowledge really is a core strength. They know the products inside out and that’s what you expect from an applications specialist. The new solutions have markedly improved data quality, streamlined the submission cycle, automated key analyses such as working capital and treasury reporting, and provisioned meaningful reports to key stakeholders. All this has been achieved with minimal increase in Head Office staff despite the business growing exponentially." – Jason Care, Head of IT