Assessing the Finance Function & Planning Transformation
The Situation
A $2B transportation and logistics company with 13+ operating companies across North America sought to achieve operational improvement goals to improve cost efficiency and right size the Company. The Company had engaged a premier strategy consulting firm who completed an enterprise cost assessment study to identify savings targets, including finance and IT. Accordion was engaged to conduct a detailed assessment of the finance function to validate cost savings estimates and opportunity hypothesis from the enterprise assessment.
Services
Finance Function Assessment & Design
Finance Transformation
The Execution
Worked with cross-functional stakeholders in corporate and operating companies to deep dive into efficiency improvement opportunities and validate the size of the prize.
- Current State Assessment:
- Held interviews with accounting, FP&A, external reporting, tax, and IT to document current operating model, process, data & system capabilities, roles & responsibilities, and pain points.
- Conducted a deep dive analysis of the month end close process and chart of accounts.
- Piloted benchmarking analysis and time studies to evaluate efficiency, productivity, and headcount in RTR, P2P, OTC.
- Future State Design:
- Created future state finance operating model and system architecture options.
- Delivered to-be org sizing and FTE savings.
- Produced a delivery model to enable standardization and a scalable growth via shared services.
- Developed a roadmap with POC rollout approach.
- Estimated ROI.
The Results
As a result of the engagement, the Company now has a solution that improves reporting visibility and eliminates manual reconciliations via a unified COA and common source of truth for financial and operational data. Accordion established a scalable operating model and technology foundation for future growth and broke down silos between corporate and operating companies to drive change management and garner buy-in to a common target state vision. Additionally, our team gathered management support for the finance transformation program and recommended the target solution to realize $5-8M in savings.