Hain Celestial is an international food and personal care company, headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, with a passion for helping customers build health and wellness. The company produces natural foods and organic personal care items under popular brands, such as Celestial Seasonings, Earth’s Best, Terra Chips, and Linda McCartney Foods.
Business Challenges
Hain Celestial’s aggressive growth through acquisition introduced a fragmented ERP landscape, with each acquired entity operating on separate systems and inconsistent transactional data structures. This disjointed environment created a heavy reliance on manual processes for essential activities like reconciliation, consolidation, and management reporting, leading to inefficiencies and delays. Compounding the issue, Hain’s planning and reporting functions were driven by complex Excel models that required ongoing maintenance and careful oversight to ensure data integrity. Critical analytics, such as Price-Volume-Mix (PVM) reporting, were constrained by Excel’s limitations and the manual effort needed to sustain them. Additionally, Hain’s decentralized operating model led to siloed processes across business units, with planning assumptions often misaligned from standardized corporate reporting structures, which hampered enterprise-wide visibility and decision-making.
Approach
To address its fragmented planning and reporting environment, Hain Celestial selected Peloton Consulting Group as its transformation partner, drawn to Peloton’s deep Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) expertise, proven success with Oracle Cloud financial implementations, and strategic approach that brings together people, process, and technology. Peloton’s collaborative team brought industry accelerators to increase time-to-value and tailored solutions to Hain’s unique needs. The team implemented the Oracle Cloud EPM Suite, migrating from on-premises HFM to Cloud EPM Financial Close to standardize consolidations, automate cash flow processes, and enhance drill-through reporting capabilities. Oracle Cloud EPM Planning enabled robust financial statement and gross margin budgeting, forecasting, and detailed reporting, supported by driver-based calculations that improved accuracy and scenario planning. To reduce dependency on error-prone spreadsheets and manual global coordination, Peloton developed a custom Price-Volume-Mix (PVM) reporting application that delivered granular variance analysis at the product and customer level across all versions and scenarios. Standardized business structures and transparent data mappings were also established to align local operations with corporate reporting, creating a unified and scalable cloud-based platform that reduces financial risk, improves forecasting precision, and positions Hain for continued growth.
Business Impact
By implementing Oracle Cloud EPM, Hain Celestial transformed its planning, reporting, and financial close processes into streamlined, scalable operations that now support both day-to-day efficiency and long-term strategic growth. The automation of previously manual and redundant tasks (reconciliations, consolidations, and spreadsheet-based reporting) freed up internal resources to focus on high-value activities like detailed SKU- and customer-level analysis. These gains in operational efficiency not only improved business insights but also laid the groundwork for faster, smoother integration of future acquisitions. With robust integration and data mapping capabilities, Hain is now positioned to accelerate the time-to-value from its ongoing growth initiatives, ensuring that new business units can be brought into the fold with far greater speed and consistency than ever before.
Summary
As a leading natural and organic food and personal care products company, The Hain Celestial Group faced growing complexity in its financial operations due to expansion, siloed processes, and heavy reliance on manual Excel-based planning and reporting. These challenges limited forecasting accuracy, slowed close cycles, and hindered enterprise-wide visibility. Partnering with Peloton Consulting Group, Hain implemented Oracle Cloud EPM to unify its financial systems, automate key activities, and standardize reporting across all business units. Leveraging Peloton’s deep CPG expertise and strategic, accelerator-driven approach, Hain now benefits from a scalable, cloud-based platform that supports robust driver-based planning, detailed Price-Volume-Mix reporting, and rapid integration of future acquisitions. The result: streamlined operations, reduced manual work, and greater agility to support long-term growth in the competitive natural foods market.
