A search for harmony
When making the operating model adjustments needed to keep a business growing, balance is key
SAVINGS SUCCESSFULLY
CAPTURED —
TO THE TUNE OF
TENS OF MILLIONS
A YEAR
The Situation
Have you ever whittled? It’s a bit of a lost art, but the thing with whittling is, if you are too aggressive, you cut away too much wood. And that figure (maybe it’s a bird) you were trying to create? Destroyed. But, at the same time, cut too conservatively, and that bird remains trapped in the wood. There’s an art to it, and that art is all about balance. Find the balance, find the bird.
The strategic leadership team of a global wholesale distributor, facing margin pressures while needing to set a growth plan for the next decade, knew something about balance themselves. The fact was that cost savings and time and process efficiencies needed to be delivered—their growth depended on it. They needed to be bold and transformational in their thinking. But move too aggressively and the risk to the business would be too high. Again. Balance.
Compounding that challenge was an outdated shared service model, a lack of process standardization that had created inefficiencies in executing work, and activity fragmentation across functions and locations that had created inefficiencies across roles. All of these challenges needed to be addressed and executed in the strategic plan, as the organization embarked on its growth path. A daunting challenge. For help, the team turned to Deloitte, and its Restructuring Services capabilities.
THE SOLVE
SAVINGS IN THE
TENS OF MILLIONS
AND MORE
STRATEGIC TIME
FOR EMPLOYEES—
A WIN-WIN.
The Impact
This work has resulted in the company beginning to head down a path to between $20 million and $30 million in annual gross recurring benefits across both back-office and front-office functions. These savings are projected as part of the future-state service delivery model, detailing solutions for greater adoption of shared services, automation, offshoring, and standardization of work. Right now, the company has moved into the activation phase, taking immediate steps to realize significant near-term savings.
These changes, which include aggressive automation of repetitive tasks and right-cost delivery of services, have also helped to free up employees’ time for more strategic tasks, such as focusing on a substantive digitization effort that is already in progress, more focus on role specialization efforts, and growth and development activities.
The activation phase has provided the business with a detailed roadmap and prioritized actions to deliver savings and business process efficiencies across back-office and front-office functions, allowing for the execution of business process standardization and automation in-house where capabilities exist. The analysis of change impacts has further allowed the company to understand how the implementation would affect its business beyond the financial savings.
Looking ahead, the company is looking at expanding the scope of this initial activation phase to encompass the broader transformation journey, bringing more functions and business units into the fold and executing on many of the recommended changes across the enterprise.
LET'S CONNECT.
Do these challenges sound familiar?