Consolidation without the complexity: LCS’s path to a scalable finance future

Facing complex, outdated systems and a pressing need to leave legacy infrastructure behind, LCS found a faster, more intuitive path to consolidation in the cloud.

Life Care Services (LCS) is a leader in senior living, managing over 130 communities across the United States. With more than 50 years of experience in the industry, LCS is dedicated to helping seniors live with dignity, comfort, and purpose. That mission demands a solid operational foundation — and accurate, timely financial insights are critical to delivering it.

When legacy systems hold finance back

LCS was using an on-premise Oracle Hyperion solution for consolidation and reporting. The platform was rigid and expensive to maintain, with processes that limited access to just a few power users and required deep coding knowledge. Much of the logic lived in complex Visual Basic scripts that felt like a black box to the team, making it difficult to trace calculations or feel confident in the numbers.

As the business grew in scale and complexity, LCS found the system increasingly unsustainable. Their on-premise infrastructure added risk, and with their data center set to be decommissioned, the team faced an urgent need to move to the cloud. They didn’t want to invest in another self-hosted environment or manage a new provider just to keep outdated software running. Finance needed a way to:

• More easily consolidate data from multiple ERPs across five core business lines, corporate operations, and more than 2,000 chart of account entries

• Support complex ownership structures, including equity method and non-controlling interests

• Eliminate reliance on IT and reduce overall cost of ownership

• Enable faster, more collaborative close and reporting cycles

Why LCS chose Anaplan

When evaluating cloud-based alternatives, LCS considered multiple vendors — including OneStream. But for Controller Ross Kelderman and his team, Anaplan stood out as the clear winner.

With Anaplan’s financial consolidation and reporting, LCS gained:

• A finance-owned, no-code cloud solution

• Support for intercompany eliminations, allocations, equity pickups, and more

• An intuitive interface that enabled broader finance team engagement

• A scalable, flexible platform to meet their current and future needs

Laying the groundwork for a quick, confident go-live

LCS launched its implementation in April 2023 in partnership with the Anaplan services team. With a clear focus on speed and self-sufficiency, the team prioritized enablement right from the start and were live for their June 2023 close. As Ross shared, the insistence on completing training upfront “helped us design and implement with confidence.”

By investing time in Anaplan’s self-paced training content, the LCS team quickly gained the knowledge needed to tailor the solution to their business requirements. They modeled consolidation logic to reflect the intricacies of their operations, including investment and fee-for-service business lines, and built a structure that gave them clean, real-time visibility across all entities.

In just four months, LCS replicated and enhanced the functionality of their legacy system. They officially shut down Hyperion by the end of the year and brought additional users into Anaplan to support ad hoc reporting and deeper analysis.

Modern finance, no IT required

With Anaplan, LCS has completely modernized its consolidation and reporting processes — and shifted ownership of the processes to finance, where it belonged. That shift has delivered measurable impact across every part of their close and reporting cycle:

• Faster closes: The team reduced month-end timelines and now answers business questions in real time.

• Expanded collaboration: More team members can participate in the close process thanks to an intuitive, flexible interface.

• No IT reliance: Finance owns the data, metadata, integrations, and maintenance.

• Improved analysis: With less time spent on manual work, the team can focus on financial storytelling and decision support.

• Scalable success: LCS’s success helped influence its parent company, Redwood Capital Management and some of their subsidiaries, to adopt Anaplan for consolidation, too.

The intuitive experience has made it easy for more users to contribute to the close process — freeing up leadership to focus more on strategic analysis and storytelling, rather than managing technical systems or manual work.

Built for finance, ready for what’s next

LCS proves that finance doesn’t have to settle for slow, complex, or IT-dependent solutions. By replacing their legacy system with a modern cloud solution, LCS reclaimed control of its consolidation process and created space to focus on what matters most: delivering better outcomes for the people they serve.

With Anaplan, they didn’t just close faster — they built a more scalable, strategic finance function ready for the future.