ERP-enabled Finance Transformation

We help finance organisations leverage their ERP to finally transform into agile, data-driven, and value-add business partners. Capable of driving operational excellence, reducing costs and releasing precious resources.

The ERP Trap

CFOs know they need to transform the finance function by increasing agility to support the business, embrace continuous change and deliver real-time actionable insights from data.

Many finance teams have pursued transformation by implementing a ‘state of the art’ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution in the belief that this will deliver a modern, digitally-enabled finance function. Only to be disappointed and frustrated that finance resources remain trapped in low-value add (LVA) work despite technology investments.

However, an ERP implementation is NOT a digital finance transformation.

Without an all-encompassing strategy to transform finance, incorporating change, culture, people, process, data and technology, the implementation results in a shiny, new ‘what we’ve already got’ devoid of business benefits and a demotivated project and change-averse finance team.

Are you facing one of these typical scenarios?

Initiation and Delivery

You are contemplating finance transformation incorporating an ERP implementation and upgrade but are not sure where to start.

Transformation Turnaround

Your finance transformation is already in progress but you are experiencing issues with ERP delivery and/or the wider process, people and change delivery putting the transformation at risk.

Business As Usual Turnaround

Your ERP has been implemented or upgraded, billed as delivering finance transformation but so far the benefits – beyond the technical – have not been realised.

Our Solution

Our service is designed to empower CFOs and their teams to deliver transformation and thrive in an environment where constant change is the ‘new normal’.

We help you to become a proactive business services-orientated function. Data-driven, using real-time insight and automated low-level transaction processing integrated with non-finance systems.

We do this by creating an effective finance transformation strategy and architectural plan interlaced with a combination of ERP as your ‘digital core’ integrated with ‘front of house’ digital capabilities. Along with a comprehensive ERP-enabled finance transformation roadmap to deliver the strategy and enable successful execution.

Solving These Challenges

  • Demands to increase finance’s leadership in strategy and innovation.
  • Shareholders demands for sustainable growth and profitability.
  • Business leaders demanding real-time insights.
  • Increasing demand across the enterprise for business partnering and agile business support to support value creation and growth.
  • Need to improve real-time cost management.
  • Finance resources trapped in low value-add repetitive tasks.
  • Need to upskill finance to leverage technology inc AI/ML and embrace innovation.
  • Covid highlighting the need for increased agility, resilience and risk management.
  • Delivering improvements in productivity and operational efficiency.
  • Difficult ongoing tasks for meeting ever-changing compliance requirements.

Bringing These Benefits

  • Releasing finance resources trapped in low-value-added work to increase business partnering.

  • Increased agility, operational efficiency and effectiveness and reduced costs.

  • Provide near/real-time actionable insight from data to inform strategy and drive operational excellence.

  • Strengthen customer service with ERP-hosted, centralised customer data.

  • Improved reporting and planning from ERP’s unified reporting system.

  • Data stewardship and single source of truth.

  • Business partners assisting with demand forecasting, inventory management and procurement.

  • Tech-savvy finance team, able to innovate.

  • Agile business support enabled by a flexible, modular and scalable ERP platform.

  • Regulatory compliance aided by ERP.

What We Do

We appreciate that transformation is challenging and CFOs may require support through initiation and delivery phases, in-flight transformation turnaround or transformation assurance.

Service 1 – Initiation

  • Listen to understand your challenges and capture your specific finance transformation and ERP implementation or upgrade objectives.
  • Engage with all key stakeholders to evaluate how closely the finance transformation strategy aligns with the business strategy and will increase finance’s value add.
  • Gain c-suite leadership alignment and sponsorship of finance transformation priorities.
  • We will work with you to deliver the vision, strategy, approach, roadmap, benefits definition and business case, enabling you to win board approval and initiate transformation.
  • A central pillar of our service is to ensure your ERP capability is integrated with the changes required to your operating model and ‘ways of working’ in order to realise the new target operating model.
Service 2 – Delivery

  • We will manage all aspects of the transformation, aligning with your governance practices and managing vendors, and internal and interim external resources until all benefits are realised.
  • Adopting agile delivery via controlled sprints, benefits are quickly and incrementally delivered through the lifespan of the transformation.
  • By increasing the inclusion of the entire finance team on the transformation journey, we produce a successful change in business processes, ways of working and culture.
  • Support your journey with a range of people-related transformation services including executive coaching, change management and technology awareness.
  • Provide the communication and training for the team to embrace innovation, constant change, process improvement and agile ‘ways of working’. All key attributes required within your newly transformed finance function.
Service 3 – Turnaround

  • We diagnose and provide feedback across facets of the transformation including:
  1. Vision, strategy, approach, roadmap and benefits definition
  2. Current and target operating models and architecture
  3. Governance structures and vendor performance
  • We will work with you to remediate across the relevant stages of your transformation, particularly initiation, ERP implementation and adoption, reverting to prior stages should remediation deem it necessary.
  • Based on the level of remediation required and your available resources, we will propose either our assurance or delivery services, tailored to your specific turnaround needs.
Service 4 – Assurance

  • We will work alongside you in a CFO advisory and transformation assurance role.
  • We provide finance transformation and ERP subject matter and delivery experts to assure the strategic, operating model, architecture, delivery, product, vendor and governance areas are on track.
  • We deliver the assurance to keep the transformation on track and realise the defined benefits, through backwards-looking audits or forward-looking taking a risk management approach.

Previous success

Oil and Gas

Creating the ERP strategy and roadmap for the consolidated European subsidiaries of a US-owned Oil and Gas business.

Oil and gas case study

  • The business had expanded in Europe through acquisitions; achieving growth goals but creating operational and technological growing pains.

  • The US parent business wanted to streamline operations and cut operating and IT costs with a shared service centre for customer service, finance and procurement.

  • Before the service centre could be created, the various inherited legacy ERP systems needed to be amalgamated – presenting the opportunity to improve and automate a variety of paper-based business processes.

  • Releasing staff from repetitive low-value add and remedial tasks, allowing teams to focus on improving customer service, finance and procurement activities.

We established where the business was not operating to its full capacity, benchmarked these functions against industry best practices and made recommendations about how to improve outcomes for the company.

Our team visited the company’s five European facilities and engaged with staff in interviews and focus groups. We reviewed the company’s documentation to understand key processes.

Throughout the engagement, we operated in a ‘planned and agile manner’ to deliver:

  • ERP insight and business analysis.

  • Vision review and affirmation.

  • Creation of ERP strategy, plan and roadmap.

  • Business, functional and technical architecture.

  • Alignment with client’s data architecture.

  • Support of business case development.

Our analyses confirmed that the client’s concerns were well founded; paper-based and suboptimal processes were generating errors and time-consuming remediation activity.

We found that the sales teams were spending a disproportionate amount of time on sales administration about cultivating new clients, and the finance staff were too caught up in low-value add tasks to be able to concentrate on long-term forecasting.

The solution consolidated the company’s three ERP systems. Due to budgetary constraints, we developed an rationalised ERP-based strategy and architecture that would deliver:

  • Increased productivity and flexibility of staff by using automation and integration to replace manual, predominantly paper-based processes.

  • Enhanced reporting and analysis via a single unified data warehouse.

  • Beneficial data insights by fostering collaboration across business units.

  • Innovative planning and simulation capabilities.

The client reduced IT costs with a single ERP solution and by retiring multiple ad-hoc applications and the strategy and roadmap have now been incorporated into the client’s overall strategy.

Financial Services

ERP selection process leads insurance business to abolish disparate legacy systems and improve processes with a new ERP solution.

ERP Insurance case study

  • Our client’s existing processes and systems were struggling to meet the needs of its growing business due to continued rapid growth through further product development and planned future acquisitions.

  • Laborious manual processes resulted in a duplication of effort, unnecessary risk of errors, and a lack of ability to understand the business in real-time.

  • Before the service centre could be created, the various inherited legacy ERP systems needed to be amalgamated – presenting the opportunity to improve and automate a variety of paper-based business processes.

  • They had difficulty consolidating financials, performing reconciliations and closing the books in a timely manner, allocating operating expenses to appropriate accounts and subsidiaries, managing its payables, receivables and employee expense processes.

  • Poor integration resulted in errors in transferring revenue and cost data from their policy and claims platforms into their accounting system.

  • The client was incapable of achieving the level of reporting they required and unable to implement the expected level of controls.

  • The client was aware their existing processes were inefficient and their technology was not the enabler it should be, but they were unsure of the best way forward. This enabled them to make informed decisions regarding their planned business system modernisation.

  • We helped them articulate and document their challenges, prioritise their most relevant pain points and understand the solutions available to them, using our Initiation Service.

  • To engage client stakeholders, encourage buy-in and articulate the project goals, we started with a review of the client documentation and critical business processes using interviews and cross-functional workshops with business process owners.

  • Several key themes throughout the organisation were identified that impacted the business’s ability to reduce its heavy dependence on manual processes and improve data visibility. These included insufficient/multiple different systems and siloed processes built around inefficient controls to minimise risk.

  • We identified the best solution to bridge the process and technology gaps – presenting the vision, strategy, approach, roadmap and defined benefits of migration of the business’s financial functions to a modern ERP platform.

  • A potential delivery plan and high-level pricing budgets of the system modernisation project were outlined for a full understanding of the project’s resource requirements.

  • The client decided to pursue its modernisation initiative and selected SAP’s S/4HANA as its ERP solution and engaged us to support it throughout the procurement and implementation processes.

  • We quickly guided the client through the S/4HANA procurement process, navigating the product licensing and finalising a multi-year services contract. Our client accessed our Delivery Service to drive change through the business.

  • Pace and agility were key drivers. Phase 1 was to optimise the chart of accounts, reporting dimensions and provide a framework for the future.

  • The go-live was on-time and on budget enabling the benefits of the system to be quickly realised. Quick wins were identified that took advantage of S/4HANA’s most intuitive and beneficial features.

  • Phase 2 saw the gradual rollout of additional functionality, advanced features and third-party add-ons to optimise their investment.

  • The client continues to invest in its system to achieve the financial and operational excellence that will help the business further accelerate its terrific record of success into the future.

Meet Some of Our ERP-led Finance Transformation Team

Our team have multi-sector and muti-functional experience. This means they can bring successful learnings from other sectors and often can former smaller multi-discipline teams than other consultancies – quickly solving problems and delivering quality.

Marjory Carrero
Marjory Carrero
Commercial FP&A and Finance Transformation
Iqbal Singh
Iqbal Singh
Programme & Project Manager,
Transformation & Innovation

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