19% Overhead Reduction to Self-Funded Technology Modernisation

Our client, a PE backed company creating and maintaining green spaces, required significant changes to its business model to be more resilient against competitors, and wider financial challenges within this market.

The Challenge

Following a period of rapid organic and acquisition-led growth, the business faced severe operational and financial challenges. A fragmented and inefficient legacy technology base and operating model were unable to support the company's expanded scale, causing widespread process and service failures across the organisation.

The Strategy

We were mandated to lead a comprehensive 12-month turnaround. The core strategy was to engineer a self-funding transformation. Immediate organisational cost savings and working capital optimisation were prioritised to capture early benefits and build client confidence. Reinvesting a portion of these savings into critical, long-term technology enhancements created strong business discipline when evaluating and choosing technology investments.

What we did

Operating Model Restructuring: Restructured the core Finance function, rightsizing the organisation from 66 to 48 FTEs focusing on roles essential to good service, eliminating oversight functions, or roles that were not output focused. We took particular care in the structure, as we needed to retain and reward key talent where it was most crucial to improve overall service.

Working Capital PMO: Established a dedicated PMO and deployed targeted data analytics (SQL, Power BI) to track, target, and systematically clear massive backlogs in aged debt and payables. Making it visible to Stakeholders was incredibly powerful in driving the result.

ERP Acceleration & Remediation: Accelerated a critical ERP deployment in Northern Ireland to replace an out-of-support system, aligning it with the head office platform. The savings of maintaining an older system paid for the deployment. We Eliminated system bottlenecks, upgraded to the latest versions, and launched 3 new specialised modules to dramatically enhance user experience without the cost of a full ERP replacement.

IT Infrastructure Overhaul: Mitigated critical cyber risks and improved enterprise scalability by executing a data centre relocation, migrating file servers to SharePoint, and transitioning Citrix users to Remote Desktop Services (RDS)—modernising the IT function to improve resilience and service delivery with a flat headcount.

Results

EBITDA Enhancement: Achieved a 19% reduction in Finance overheads, delivering a £0.6m annualised EBITDA benefit used to directly self-fund the subsequent IT upgrades.

Cash Flow improvements: Unlocked £2m–£3m in cash flow through rigorous working capital optimisation, significantly reducing corporate interest costs.

Commercial & Operational Uplift: Rebuilt the company's reputation with a strained supplier base by resolving poor payment performance, which directly enabled Operations to secure better pricing and improved service levels from suppliers.

Scalable Architecture: Delivered a stabilized, resilient, and highly scalable enterprise architecture primed for future digital enhancements..

ERP Post-Implementation Rescue: Slashing Unbilled Revenue by CHF 55m and Unlocking €30m Cash Flow for a Global Media Leader

Supporting a major international player in the Media industry, we focused on operations across the high-value DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and the Shared Services Centre (SSC) in Portugal.

The Challenge

Following a highly problematic and complex Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) ERP implementation, the business suffered severe technical and operational failures. Most critically, a broken billing function resulted in a massive backlog of unbilled revenue, stalling corporate cash flow, endangering Group fiscal targets, and leaving a severe backlog of overdue statutory audits and tax submissions in Germany.

Our Strategy

The immediate strategy was to execute a dual-track approach: rapidly remediating the critical billing and revenue-generating functions as quickly as possible to secure cash, while simultaneously remediating D365 and Finance Operating Model to achieve long-term ERP stability.

What we did

Data Warehouse & BI Upgrades: built a suite of reports to monitor and identify where the backlogs were in two weeks. We could then understand the nature of the problems and simulate the solutions. Project governance was set up to monitor progress, and to push where needed.

System & Revenue Remediation: Led the emergency recovery of the D365 billing engine, systematically fixing system bugs and process bottlenecks to accelerate invoice generation.

Operating Model Redesign: Documented and executed the end-to-end "As-Is" to "To-Be" financial operating model, restructuring roles and workflows to establish sustainable post-ERP finance operations.

Results

Rapid Billing Liquidation: Slashed unbilled revenue from CHF 85m to CHF 30m in just four months—a CHF 55m reduction in locked capital.

Cash Flow Inflow: Unlocked approximately €30m in cash flow within the 2022 fiscal year, enabling the region to hit its critical Group fiscal targets.

IT Architecture Stabilisation: Slash IT costs, deliver new functionality to grow Sales Opportunities & automation of administration

The client, a Mid-sized enterprise requiring an overhaul of its core commercial and financial ecosystems. The project involved integrating global platforms across Sales, Marketing, HR, and Treasury into the central architecture.

The Challenge

The business was operating on an unstable ERP environment with fragmented, siloed platforms across HR, Marketing, and Sales. Manual processing of hundreds of weekly multi-currency banking transactions caused significant cash collection delays, while data fragmentation between front-office and back-office systems blocked lead visibility and slowed executive decision-making.

The Strategy

First, stabilise the core ERP, find the quick wins in cost reduction, and then design a future unified enterprise architecture strategy.

The second phase targeted administrative friction, and build automated data pipelines that accelerated cash cycles and increased measurable sales opportunities.

What we did

IT cost savings: Led high-stakes contract negotiations with ERP vendor to restructure licensing terms to achieve immediate and recurring operational savings. We also identified other unnecessary cost savings through a detailed review of IT costs

Revenue Operations (RevOps) Deployment: Led the implementation of Salesforce and Marketo, establishing robust API syncs to NetSuite alongside custom-built monitoring bots to automate workflows and maintain real-time data cleansing.

Payments Automation: Engineered and deployed automated API integrations connecting NetSuite with Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Stripe, entirely removing manual human intervention from hundreds of weekly financial transactions.

Business Intelligence: Overhauled and upgraded the enterprise Power BI infrastructure, consolidating disparate data streams from CRM, marketing automation, HR systems and the ERP into a single source of truth.

Results

Recurring Cost savings: £0.1m per annum through the successful IT cost review and NetSuite vendor negotiation.

Instant Cash Collection: Accelerated the treasury cash collection cycle from hours to just seconds per day, drastically improving liquidity tracking.

Commercial Lead Generation: Enabled a measurable uplift in viable, high-quality sales leads by automating RevOps workflows and unifying data between Salesforce and Marketo.

Executive Visibility: Eradicated administrative overhead in back office functions while establishing real-time, data-driven executive reporting across all core business units.

Transformation achieving $13m p.a. savings, and reinvesting in Strategic Analytics for a FTSE 50 Leader

A FTSE 50 multi-national corporation requiring a global modernisation of its finance operating structure and corporate reporting systems.

The Challenge

The organisation lacked a unified global approach to its finance operations, resulting in bloated regional overheads and missed cost-saving opportunities. Concurrently, the business needed to modernise its reporting infrastructure to automate highly complex global tax compliance and vertical business unit analysis, but lacked a structured model to identify and fund these strategic needs.

The Strategy

Appointed as Transformation Program Director to design and set up the Global Finance Transformation Programme from the ground up. The core strategy was to leverage a Global Business Services (GBS) model to identify structural overhead savings, rapidly executing operational efficiencies, and then reinvesting those financial benefits into building an advanced corporate data and analytics architecture.

What we did

Identifying & Mapping savings: Conducted an exhaustive operational review across international regions to identify inefficiencies, designing a scalable blueprint to transition fragmented workflows into a lean, consolidated GBS model.

Executing Operational Restructuring: Standardised core finance structures and executed the phase-one regional transitions to capture rapid operational overhead reductions and build project momentum.

Reinvesting in the IT & Data Architecture: Re-deployed the captured savings to fund and implement an advanced Tax Transfer Pricing Calculation Model and multi-dimensional vertical business unit reporting, integrating enterprise data feeds across SAP, Anaplan, and TM1 (IBM Planning Analytics).

Results

Self-Funded Transformation: Delivered $3m in annualised financial benefits within Year 1, which was used to fund immediate technology investments, while embedding a roadmap scaling to $13m per annum at full maturity.

Automated Compliance & Forecasting: Eradicated manual calculation risks and spreadsheet bottlenecks by fully automating complex cross-border tax transfer pricing metrics.

Unified Corporate Reporting: Replaced fragmented data silos with real-time, vertical business unit performance insights, significantly accelerating the executive decision-making and compliance cycle.

BPO & Balance Sheet Risk eliminated: how to deliver £60m in Savings and solve a €200m Balance Sheet problem

The Challenge

The organization needed to execute a massive, multi-country outsourcing transition to capture cost efficiencies, but faced high risks of post-migration service disruption. Simultaneously, regional operations were plagued by critical process failures—including a 4,000-invoice AP backlog in Italy, billing inefficiencies on 100,000 German transactions, severe UK media payable failures with £18m in locked balance sheet items, and €200m in global audit risks reported to the Board.

Strategy

Appointed to lead the entire EMEA transition strategy. The core approach was to pioneer an innovative "Fix & Shift" methodology—rapidly stabilizing and optimizing critical market processes before migration to drastically accelerate transition timelines, insulate the business from post-go-live operational failure, and protect service delivery.

What we did

Global BPO Transition Execution: Spearheaded the end-to-end operational and technical transition of 12 EMEA markets to Genpact, standardizing cross-border workflows and SLA frameworks.

Multi-Market Operational Rescues: Remediated critical underperforming hubs, leveraging Six Sigma methodologies to eliminate the Italian AP backlog, restructuring the Polish SSC to cut effort on 100,000 transactions by 10%, and fixing failing UK media payable operations to recover locked capital.

Board-Level Risk & Audit Remediation: Led a high-stakes balance sheet recovery and controls remediation project to successfully neutralize enterprise audit risks.

ERP & Intelligent Automation Rollout: Directed the successful pilot go-live of a global Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) template integrated to a new media platform, while deploying intelligent OCR software to ingest and automate invoices.

Cross-Platform BI Alignment: Architected a unified Tableau BI platform to integrate legacy systems with cloud-based infrastructure, and built automated reconciliation engines using Excel VBA to eliminate manual spreadsheets.

Results

£60m BPO Savings: Secured £60m in operational savings over five years via the highly optimized Genpact outsourcing model.

Capital Recovery & €200m Risk De-risking: Successfully mitigated €200m in global audit risks reported to the Board, while directly unlocking and recovering £18m in cash from the UK balance sheet.

Drastic Backlog Elimination: Slashed seasonal invoicing processing backlogs from three months down to just two weeks using intelligent OCR automation.

Unlocking £30m in Free Cash & £1m Annual Interest Savings, and reinvesting it Global Operations Build

As Head of Shared Services, tasked with building and running a centralized finance function managing a global credit control portfolio of 400 accounts across 90 countries and accounts payable (AP) processing of £150m across seven core markets.

The Challenge

The organization lacked a unified, centralized finance infrastructure, resulting in fragmented transactional accounting, volatile Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), and hidden pockets of trapped cash. Additionally, third-party credit control suppliers were driving up operational overheads, and a newly acquired production house needed rapid financial and systems integration to prevent operational friction.

Strategy: Appointed to establish, scale, and lead the centralized Shared Services function from the ground up. The core strategy was to build a robust, institutionalized transactional hub while deploying advanced, proprietary treasury cash models to expose trapped liquidity, optimize working capital, and ruthlessly cut operating expenses through strategic insourcing.

What we did

Greenfield Hub Setup & Operations: Built the entire Shared Services function from scratch, implementing standardized systems for general ledger master data, automated auto-posting systems, and year/month-end statutory reporting.

Proprietary Treasury Cash Modelling: Developed and executed a custom, physical cash flow forecasting model to map and monitor cash across global subsidiaries.

Global Credit Control & Working Capital Optimization: Took direct ownership of a sprawling credit control portfolio across 90 countries, implementing targeted collection strategies and automated payment tracking to stabilize DSO.

Strategic Insourcing & M&A Integration: Displaced costly third-party credit control providers by transitioning activities in-house, while directing the post-merger financial integration of an acquired third-party production house.

Results

Identified and released £30m in free cash via the physical cash flow model, which was used to relieve debt and acquire Global Operations subsidiary. Reduced global corporate interest expenses by £1m per annum by optimizing cash positioning and internal liquidity.

£1.4m Cash Flow Boost: Freed an additional £1.4m in working capital within the first 12 months through aggressive ledger management.

>£200k Direct OpEx Reduction: Delivered over £200k in recurring annual savings by successfully insourcing the credit control function.