Major Global Consulting Firm
This major Consulting Firm undertook a programme to further transform their finance function: improving financial controls; freeing up capacity; elevating Finance colleagues to focus on better business partnering and providing insight to the business. The key drivers of this were: rigorous standardisation of all finance processes across all countries; adoption of a single common financial systems platform (SAP S/4 HANA in the cloud); elimination of activities being done by Finance that are unnecessary/should be done by others; consolidation of responsibility and accountability for all processing tasks into a global finance operations team; increasing use of RPA to supplement the system; enhancing data management, and creating a dedicated analytics team. The implementation work began in Spring 2021 and resulted in a cutover to the new platform and ways of working in August 2023, with 70 countries and 135 legal entities going live successfully on the same day.
As Senior Adviser, we worked alongside the Finance Programme Lead and Technology counterpart. Initially, the advice was on
making sure that the programme was set up for success: what to focus on; how to be organised, and the cadence around managing a large team that had folk from the Finance and Technology functions, plus other implementation partner organisations. Additionally, we advised on the business transformation side of the programme: driving initial business engagement with finance leadership; bringing in expertise; setting up a change champion network, and championing the investments in engagement, communications, standard operating procedures and learning.
Throughout the programme, our role was to hold the programme to account; calling out risks and issues, and forcing the client to face up to the realities of their challenges.
Oliver Wyman
As a Senior Adviser to Oliver Wyman’s Organisational Effectiveness and Digital practices, supported a strategic review and redesign of the portfolio governance regime for a Finance Transformation programme at the UK's largest food retailer.