John Kowalkowski, Senior Manager of Financial Systems at BradyPLUS, shares the wild story of taking over a failing OneStream implementation, managing consolidations across 35-40 different ERPs, and building a roadmap for a newly formed $5 billion distribution company. Plus, insights on AI from someone with actual machine learning background.

John started when an implementation was at a “trainwreck status”. Everyone was overwhelmed with too many responsibilities. John took it over, spent a year getting everything in place amid ongoing organizational change. The data wrangling nightmare included 35-40 individual ERPs and ended up being organized and usable.

John’s machine learning background makes his AI takes carry weight. He thinks OneStream is taking the right track with a plug-and-play approach. With about a third of Splash sessions being AI-related, you could be cynical and say it’s just positioning, but “their hearts are in it” and they’re making good decisions building it into the platform.