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Success Story | Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences

A Prescription for Financial Clarity: Future-Proofing Planning in the Pharmaceutical Industry

How OneStream and Ascend Transformed Forecasting, Workforce Planning, and Financial Insight

Our client is headquartered in Toronto, ON and is one of Canada’s largest pharmaceutical companies and a global leader in generic drug manufacturing. With annual revenues over $5B and more than 11,000 employees worldwide, the company continues to invest in digital transformation to improve efficiency and strengthen financial transparency.

 

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The Challenge 

  • Fragmented Planning Technology Landscape: The client relied on a combination of Excel-based processes, multiple SAP instances, and regional planning tools to support planning activities. This complex technology landscape increased administrative effort, limited scalability, and made it difficult to establish consistent planning processes across the organization.
  • Manual Data Consolidation and Limited Transparency: Planning data was distributed across systems, business units, and geographic regions, requiring significant manual effort to consolidate and reconcile information. As a result, stakeholders lacked a unified view of planning activities and business performance.
  • Limited Financial Insight and Decision Support:The legacy environment made it difficult to compare actual results against budgets and forecasts in a meaningful and timely manner. This constrained financial analysis, scenario evaluation, and management's ability to make informed decisions.
  • Disconnected and Inefficient Planning Processes: Workforce planning, financial planning, and consolidation processes operated with limited integration and relied heavily on manual calculations and disconnected workflows. This reduced confidence in planning outputs and constrained the organization's ability to support evolving business requirements.

Business Value

By choosing OneStream and Ascend, our client consolidated fragmented planning into one governed platform, gaining global workforce detail and actuals-vs-plan transparency that continue to sharpen forecasting and scenario decisions.

  • Accelerated Planning Cycle Management: P&L rebuilds and adjustments that previously took up to one week can now be completed in approximately five minutes using OneStream. By automating key planning processes and adjustments, Ascend significantly improved planning efficiency, enabling faster decision-making, greater agility, and more time for value-added analysis.
  • Enhanced Actuals vs. Plan Analysis: OneStream enables timely and meaningful comparisons between actual results, budgets, and forecasts through centralized reporting and analysis. This provides finance teams and business leaders with deeper insight into performance, supports scenario evaluation, and improves decision-making across the organization.
  • Improved Planning Governance and Consistency: Ascend unified workforce planning, financial planning, and consolidation within a connected OneStream environment, reducing reliance on manual calculations and disconnected workflows. Standardized processes, increased transparency, and improved governance have strengthened confidence in planning outputs while providing a more flexible foundation to support evolving business requirements.
  • Advanced Workforce Planning Capabilities: Ascend implemented advanced workforce planning capabilities to support complex global requirements, including country-specific regulations, taxes, currencies, and employee lifecycle planning. This enables more accurate workforce forecasting, improves visibility into labor-related costs, and supports planning decisions across a global workforce.
  • Integrated Planning and Reporting Architecture: By implementing OneStream, Ascend enabled the integration of planned product sales into a unified planning framework, providing the client with a single financial and operational model for comprehensive scenario analysis.
  • Unified Planning Platform: Ascend centralized planning activities within OneStream, replacing a fragmented planning landscape with a single platform for planning, reporting, and analysis. This established a more scalable and consistent foundation for enterprise-wide financial planning while reducing administrative complexity and dependence on disparate tools.

Choose Ascend to implement your OneStream solution.


Why Ascend?

Ascend Partners is a leading provider of bespoke EPM solutions and the most trusted OneStream Diamond Partner. We serve sophisticated global corporations seeking to enhance and future-proof their financial systems for their next stage of growth.

About OneStream

OneStream is the best-in-class cloud-based solution created to streamline complex CPM processes for growing global enterprises. Designed to alleviate pain points in planning, consolidation, and financial close, OneStream can also provide an unparalleled level of granularity, ensuring financial decisions are made with all applicable factors incorporated for reporting purposes.

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