Improve - Interim Management
Multinational property company, requiring interim management, discovers major financial issues with newly acquired customer accounts, prompting corrective action.
Context
A multinational’s newly acquired business services company experienced several managers taking redundancy packages. A key customer’s accounts lost all but one finance manager. The original ask, to provide interim financial & commercial management, quickly evolved into something more.
The ask
A week after starting, it became apparent the client’s customer accounts P&L figures and their customer’s supplier budgets, which were managed by our client, were significantly more adverse that represented. The role had just augmented to undertake an audit, determine root causes and execute corrective actions to improve operational and financial performance.
What we did
Working with the client’s customer account teams, across two enterprise applications, were audited and matched 3 years’ worth of financial and operational data, 145 thousand records, to establish the true positions.
We undertook root cause analysis to reveal an error in the financial MI coding, masked the budget overspend, and handling errors in operational practices failing to match costs which resulted in a multi-million £ swing from profit to loss.
Taking immediate corrective action to remedy errors, we then devised and executed a financial recovery plan that was acceptable to both our client and their customer. We managed that now sensitive relationship, revealing the issues, disclosing true positions, and presenting the course of corrective actions, while agreeing the recovery management measures.
Finally, we continued to fulfil our original role, providing interim management of the accounts financial and commercial activities.
Outcome
We successfully brought the client’s customer annual budget in on target, correcting a £1.7 million overspend, without significant impact to the customers delivery operations. Our client’s P&L account broke-even, recovering a £2.5 million loss, and we enabled the client to receive £7 million in withheld contract fees.
