Herbalife Nutrition Implements OneStream for Unified CPM Platform

Herbalife Nutrition is a global nutrition company that has been changing people’s lives with great nutrition products and a proven business opportunity for its independent business owners since 1980. The Company offers high-quality, science-backed products, sold in over 90 countries by entrepreneurs who provide one-on-one coaching and a supportive community that inspires their customers to embrace a healthier, more active lifestyle. Herbalife Nutrition has over 9,300 employees and generates over $4.8B in annual revenue.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, Herbalife Nutrition operates in ninety countries and had multiple legacy CPM products in place including Oracle Hyperion (HFM), Planning, FDM, Essbase and EPMA. Managing data across several applications, the Company had a very manual Excel-based process for modeling and reporting. “We were integrating from many different applications, including Oracle ERP to multiple Oracle Hyperion applications, yet they were all behaving independently,” said Vanita Thornton, Sr. Director Global Operational Accounting and Financial Systems at Herbalife Nutrition. These legacy systems were limited by dimensionality which hindered the Company’s ability to report on project-level detail. It was time for the Company to make a choice—take on a major upgrade, move to the cloud, or start looking at alternative solutions. Seeking to learn more about Oracle’s product roadmap, Herbalife Nutrition was ready to explore the market. OneStream was ultimately selected because it best complimented the Company’s system requirements to have all solutions in one product.

The first phase of implementation included global consolidations for 80 markets, global expense planning, and people planning with direct integration with their Oracle Fusion HCM system. With 600 accounting and FP&A users globally, Herbalife Nutrition went live with 2.5 years of data conversion in just 10 months in a complete “rip and replace” of Hyperion Planning, Essbase and HFM. Three months later, they went live with a Transfer Profit solution and today they are using People Planning, Parcel Service, and Diagnostics 123 solutions from the OneStream MarketPlaceTM. “People Planning added more flexibility with the way we calculate compensation. Integrating directly with our HR system gives us more control and accurate data,” said Neal Yeung, Director of Financial Systems FP&A at Herbalife Nutrition. With 90+ entities and 30+ currencies, Herbalife Nutrition manages a high volume of intercompany sales activity. As such, they are uniquely using OneStream as a solution to calculate the transfer profit in ending inventory, prepare the monthly elimination journal entry and assess the FX impact to cost of sales (calculation based on estimated quantities sold in the month). “OneStream helps me to perform a very complicated calculation.” Thornton explains. “For example, our own manufacturing plants purchase raw material from both internal and external suppliers. Once the products are made, the related finished products would sell to our own distribution entities in US and in Luxembourg before they sell to other Herbalife entities. As such, many of our SKUs have multi-levels of transfer profit in different currencies that became impossible for anyone to perform the calculation of manually. OneStream has enabled us to easily peel back the layers and prepare our monthly elimination entries. Further, various reports are available in OneStream for the users to review the month to month fluctuation at item level by entity.”

• With OneStream, everything is now in one place for analysis. Cash flow reporting is automated, and the end users have access to reporting and analysis tools including the Excel add-in, dashboards and Cube Views. Financial statement analysis that was previously done in SharePoint is now also done in OneStream. Herbalife Nutrition is also leveraging Guided Workflow approvals to handle statement analysis forms, which are now easier to update, comment and track.
• On the FP&A side, the company is using a driver-based rolling forecast to seed next year’s budget by forecasting revenue and expenses. “Our new planning process using workflows helped to streamline how data was entered and calculated and to provide results quicker, with more transparency,” said Yeung. “We are relying less on manual processes with direct integration of HR data. We’re now able to go back to the source and consolidate information much quicker. Comparing data across multiple forecasts and translating at different FX rates without a waiting period, has definitely improved our efficiencies.”
• OneStream provides users the ability to see project code results for revenue and costs – which they didn’t have before in HFM. Now end users have more confidence in the data and are spending less time reconciling. This allows the company’s IT team to concentrate on adding value, rather than troubleshooting issues. “From an IT side, the month-end close is much smoother,” said Ajay Gaddam, Director Enterprise Application at Herbalife Nutrition. “The reliability of integrations is better, the system availability is higher, and we are no longer experiencing data loss.”

• Herbalife Nutrition went live with 2.5 years of data conversion in just 10 months.
• Automating intercompany eliminations and FX calculations for 30+ currencies.
• Eliminated licensing and maintenance costs by replacing Hyperion Planning, Essbase and HFM.