Providing Critical Finance Support In A Full Business Transformation
The Situation
Following a challenging carve-out that resulted in a significant earnings miss and replacement of the CEO & CFO, a $4 billion revenue public company engaged a top tier management consulting firm to spearhead a firm-wide multi-year transformation project aimed at increasing growth, profitability and cash. Accordion was asked to provide project management and analytical resources to support executive and middle management with design, planning and business case-creation for hundreds of transformation initiatives. As part of a highly-regimented screening process with tight deadlines in an environment of significant management turnover, the mandate required business planning and financial modeling of strategic initiatives & entry into reporting software, and initiative vetting & approval through several transformation stages.
Services
Project Management Oversight
Margin Growth Analysis
Working Capital Improvement
The Execution
- Deployed a team across 3 locations to help initiative-owners prepare hundreds of business plans spanning sales acceleration, supplier rationalization, vendor contract renegotiation, tech-enabled productivity improvements, working capital enhancements, and sales of non-strategic assets.
- Ensured that each consultant partnered with multiple workstream leaders and dozens of individual initiative-owners to:
üEvaluate commercial viability of business plans including rationality of assumptions- Identify drivers of financial impacts
- Model financial impact of each initiative
- Identify milestones in project execution
- Determine KPIs for performance-monitoring during execution
- Entry of business plan details in transformation planning and reporting platform
- Supported the executive leadership with review, correction, and approval of initiatives throughout the transformation process.
The Result
Our Accordion team generated detailed reporting tools to enable dynamic bottoms-up and top-down tracking along several axes for prioritization and tactical decisioning. We also provided support for ~800 initiatives with robust financial modeling through multiple stages of approval over a 13-week period and partnered with dozens of initiative owners across all functions to translate their focus on operational strategy into resource planning and financial outcomes. As a result of our work, the company met an aggressive timeline for the development of business cases and initiatives approval for budgeting and investor communications deadlines.