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.

Melrose partnered with Concentric Solutions to implement OneStream as a unified platform for group financial consolidation, reporting, budgeting, planning, and forecasting. Given Melrose’s complex business model and global portfolio, the organisation required a sophisticated and flexible solution capable of supporting dynamic financial processes and strategic decision-making.

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 challenge

Melrose’s dynamic “Buy, Improve, Sell” business model demanded a finance platform capable of supporting rapid change, seamless integration of new acquisitions, and transparent reporting across a global portfolio. To achieve this, the Group needed complete visibility into performance, cash flow, and future outlook, while maintaining lean operations at headquarters and devolving operational control to its business units.

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.

“Because of the nature of our business, our group was spread out across different applications – half in HFM, half in Hyperion Enterprise,” said Jason Care, Head of IT at Melrose PLC. “Therefore, we felt as a group that this wasn’t adequate. It wasn’t the way forward. We knew we had to invest in a new CPM solution.”

Beyond system fragmentation, Melrose faced several critical challenges:

• Limited visibility across group entities and data sources.
• Complex intercompany adjustments requiring manual intervention.
• Slow and resource-intensive onboarding of newly acquired businesses.
• High maintenance overheads for metadata and integrations.
• Difficulty supporting global, 24/7 access for over 600 users.

Given Melrose’s lean Group Finance structure and reliance on close collaboration with trusted partners, the organisation also required a fully managed, hosted CPM solution. This would ensure that all upgrades, configuration changes, and system administration were handled externally, allowing the Melrose HQ team to remain focused on business performance rather than technology management.

Furthermore, as divestitures are a natural part of Melrose’s lifecycle, the new system needed to support rapid separation of data and entities with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. The platform had to combine speed, scalability, and control to enable fast and accurate integration of large, newly acquired businesses – often involving millions of records – within just a few months of acquisition.

The solution

A key requirement for Melrose was a flexible, agile solution capable of supporting rapid acquisitions while retaining historical data and providing complete visibility into weekly cash flow, forecasting, and reporting. 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.

"We believed it was the right solution for our group. And the people behind the software – we felt that we had a connection with them,” Jason Care explained. “They had a very honest approach to selling software compared to some of the other vendors. They by far outranked the competition in terms of customer support. We thought all our existing Oracle products could be replaced with OneStream, in one place.”

To realise this vision, Concentric designed and implemented a resilient, fully hosted solution accessed via web-based technology, delivered in partnership with our hosting partner Rackspace. The implementation included:

• A robust hosting environment: Production, Development, and Disaster Recovery (DR) estates were established across two separate sites to ensure business continuity and strict compliance with audit and disaster recovery requirements.
• Guaranteed system availability: The solution was engineered for 99.9% uptime, supported by a combination of automated and manual system management. Since go-live, the platform has maintained 100% uptime, even during peak reporting cycles.
• Tailored infrastructure specifications: Concentric provided detailed hardware specifications for each server, enabling a bespoke environment capable of handling extremely heavy reporting workloads with tight deadlines spanning weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and annual cycles.
• Streamlined, unified processes: OneStream consolidated all reporting, forecasting, and planning functions into a single platform, eliminating the complexity of multiple disconnected applications and improving operational efficiency.
• Audit and compliance readiness: The system design ensured seamless disaster recovery and met the stringent requirements of a publicly listed company with both civilian and military contracts.

The resulting platform provided Melrose with a single, reliable, and scalable CPM environment that could adapt quickly to new acquisitions, support sophisticated financial planning, and deliver robust reporting, all while reducing operational overheads and mitigating risk.

Key benefits

• Unified platform for financial consolidation and reporting, budgeting planning & forecasting.
• Faster, more detailed management and financial reporting.
• Guided Workflow provides an organised, systematic finance process.
• Lower TCO for group reporting.

The results

By implementing OneStream, Melrose has established a single, unified platform that meets both statutory and management reporting requirements providing enterprise-wide visibility, robust audit controls, and improved analytical capabilities. Guided Workflows have enabled a structured and efficient close process, with rapid adoption across the Group’s business units.

Owned by the office of Finance, OneStream now delivers powerful management and ad-hoc reporting for both finance and business users. It consolidates multiple legacy systems into a single, agile solution that is easy to use, maintain, and adapt as the business evolves.

 Key achievements include:

• Faster, more reliable financial consolidation and reporting: A centralised platform allows subsidiary businesses to own their processes while ensuring operational relevance, accuracy, and efficiency.
• Comprehensive planning and forecasting capabilities: OneStream supports budgeting, cash flow projections, FX exposure management, scenario modelling, and “what-if” analyses, all in a single system.
• Flexibility for acquisitions and divestitures: The platform can integrate newly acquired businesses or separate divested entities quickly and accurately, without creating overhead for other Group companies.
• Improved audit controls and transparency: Unified workflows and a single source of truth ensure full traceability of changes and enhanced compliance.
• Operational scalability and reliability: The system handles the intensity of Melrose’s reporting cycles across weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and annual processes, maintaining 100% uptime since go-live.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Consolidating multiple legacy applications into OneStream reduces system complexity, maintenance effort, and operational risk.
• Rapid upgrades and minimal disruption: System upgrades can now be completed in under an hour, enabling continuous improvement with minimal operational impact.

As a result, OneStream has become a critical strategic tool for Melrose, supporting not just consolidation but also weekly cash management, detailed management reporting, long-term planning, multi-currency intercompany eliminations, and scenario analysis. According to Melrose, the managed platform is indispensable: “We could not do what we do without OneStream.”

In short, the OneStream implementation has transformed Melrose’s finance operations, delivering a unified, agile, and reliable CPM environment that supports both day-to-day operational management and strategic business decisions.

"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

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