• 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.

• I was introduced to the client at the end of 2020 when they were just making their decision to choose SAP S/4 HANA and I joined the team as their external Senior Adviser, working alongside the Finance COO/Programme Lead and his Technology counterpart.
• My task was to bring to bear my prior experience of these programmes to make sure that they were set up for success.
• Additionally, I was asked to take special interest in the business transformation side of the programme, which the client undertook themselves.

• Programme governance, advised the client on
  • key areas of focus/priority
  • how to organise the programme
  • what cadence to put around managing a large team that had folk from the Finance and Technology functions, plus their implementation partner organisations (PwC, SAP and TCS)
• Programme management, advised throughout their journey
  • holding the programme team to account
  • calling out risks and issues
  • forcing the client to face up to the realities of the challenges they faced
• Business transformation, advising and championing on
  • initial business engagement with finance leadership
  • bringing in change management expertise
  • setting up the change champion network
  • investments that were needed in business engagement, communications, standard operating procedures and learning.

Finance transformation results:

• 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 were 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
• Enhanced data management
• Creation of a dedicated analytics team.

Programme delivery results:

• 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.

Business outcomes:

• The outcomes are now in progress, but the client has already seen a reduced month end close effort and 10-15% improvement in capacity.
• The focus is now on:
  • ensuring that key revisions to finance policy and services are fully adopted by the business teams as they get to grips with the need for additional discipline in the way they work
  • bedding in the new ways of working between global finance operations and the in-country teams
  • driving additional productivity gains from new automation, and improving analytics capabilities as better data starts to flow through the systems.

• Process Effectiveness & Automation

• Business Services