Guardian
Guardian Industries, a global company headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, employs around 18,000 people and operates facilities throughout North America, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Guardian companies manufacture high-performance float, coated, and fabricated glass products for architectural, residential, interior, transportation, and technical glass applications, and high-quality chrome-plated and painted plastic components for the automotive and commercial truck industries. Guardian’s vision is to create value for its customers and society through constant innovation using fewer resources. Guardian is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc. For more information, visit guardian.com.
Results
Phase 1 of the tax provision project focused on addressing the tax provision for all US locations, and phase 2 is focusing on international locations and the monthly rollforward of data. Phase 2 includes implementing currency translation, so Guardian will be able to tie out each of their tax schedules to the GL in both local currency and US dollars.
“One of the key benefits of the new tax provision solution has been moving to a monthly provision reporting package for all locations, which was previously done only quarterly,” said McAlpine. “For the US, our close process has significantly improved, and our reporting is more accurate for all locations. Users are excited about the automation and time savings from the Excel approach. They are spending more time reviewing and analyzing tax data before submission deadlines. As we move into phase 2, our international users are looking forward to utilizing these benefits.”
According to McAlpine, “The new system will eliminate 75 spreadsheets and save an estimated 5 hours per month preparing the tax provision at each of the 75 locations. Also, the time spent to create the reports that are sent to their parent company is instantaneous as compared to the week spent in the past.”
OneStream is so user-friendly and can be applied in many areas – reporting, planning, tax and others,” said McAlpine. “Once you understand the workflow, it’s easy to leverage it more broadly. The integration and addressing so many solutions in one platform is great – you just can’t beat it!”
Aligned tax provision process to financial consolidation and reporting
Elimination of 75 spreadsheets
Saves 5 hours per month at each of 75 reporting locations
Moved to monthly provision reporting process vs. quarterly
Almost 1 week saved annually on tax reporting to parent company
Solutions
This required the configuration of a new tax account hierarchy, new legal entity structure for tax, and new forms for the provision calculations including many validations and data quality checks.
“Tying out the tax provision solution to consolidated GAAP GL earnings was a big accomplishment, and important,” said Jessica McAlpine, Project Manager at Guardian Industries. “With the new system users can add attachments to support calculations, create a journal entry to book the tax provision, and ensure the tax provision expense ties out to the GL.”
Financial Consolidation & Reporting
Account Reconciliations
Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting
Sales and Operational Planning
Tax Provision
Results
Deploying via the Cloud, with managed services from OneStream, has brought additional benefits. Fruit of the Loom is seeing more stability of the system and higher availability vs. their on-premises HFM application.
6 months to go-live
Streamlined financial consolidation and reporting
Improved visibility into financial and operating results by line of business
High availability through the OneStream Cloud
