Organizational Changes Drive Seamless Transformation of Back-Office Processes to Propel Business Strategy

The challenge 

The client’s newly appointed executive team and advisory board was seeking a partner to assist in the standardization of all back-office functions across nine existing business units as they began the transformation journey to a single operating company with two to three market segments.

Protiviti worked with executive leadership to prioritize various back-office processes and subprocesses (based on Protiviti’s in-house process schema inventories and process classifications) for a pilot standardization readiness assessment.

Using the assessment results, Protiviti developed an implementation plan to establish standardized processes, policies, and procedures for two target process areas in Procurement and Finance. The implementation plan was focused on achieving the following objectives:

• Standardizing operations allowing a focus on growth and strategic objectives
• Reducing manual processes and time to delivery in support of formal management KPIs
• Increasing compliance with corporate or central policies and procedures to drive consistency in operations and financial assumptions.
• Developing a model to eliminate redundancies and reduce operating costs.

Taking action on strategic vision

To meet these goals, Protiviti provided formal recommendations and worked in partnership with the client to implement an end-to-end transformation within procurement operations and financial budgeting and forecasting, which included:

Procurement –

• Redesigning and automating a standard requisition to purchase order process within the system of record and across all active users
• Training all relevant stakeholders and users on the process changes and technology use cases for adherence to new standards
• Established a singular approval matrix and related thresholds for all purchasing across business units and direct / indirect spend
• Formally documenting critical purchasing policies and procedures

Budgeting and forecasting –

• Developed a standardized forecast model to be used by all business units
• Collaborated with the forecasting tool (OneStream) implementation team to incorporate its functionalities within the forecast model
• Created a forecasting playbook and structured approval process
• Trained all relevant stakeholders on the standardized forecast model

Impact on the operating environment

By standardizing the purchasing process and formalizing corporately defined standards, policies, and procedures, the client was able to explore their purchasing power in greater depths   across the business units and drive towards greater communication and demand / supply planning.

By establishing a formal monthly forecasting package, the company was able to gain better insights into their revenue and opportunity pipeline   to support and drive critical business decisions, as well as improve cross-functional collaboration and alignment   across strategic, business and financial plans.