Case Studies

A global financial services organisation engaged Waterfront Consultants Implementation Mentors to improve their finance function when the benefits of recent ERP implementation had not been realised. Drive to improve the effectiveness of Finance with a focus on the "Business Partner" role and the challenge of too many finance staff. We helped to create a central Finance Service Group (FSG) based on shared services principles and methodologies; introduced new business-critical roles and introduced cross business units Finance and Business Managers to provide commercial "business partner" advice. We helped the organisation with our recommendation to introduce standard templates and reports to ease the use of the new ERP technology. As a result, there was a 40% reduction in Finance headcount; £650k annualised savings; greater focus on the high risk areas for the finance division; improved staff morale; and development of specialist ERP teams realising the benefits of the system.

Waterfront Consultants Implementation Mentors assisted a telecoms organisation whose challenges included how to achieve full benefits from its investment in Oracle and to overcome a business-unit (rather than global) approach to its finance and supply chain functions. The mentoring helped the finance and supply chain transformation programme by using the Return on Investment (ROI) methodology; enabled process transformation by creating a procurement card system; elimination of 60% of accounts payable transactions; enhanced controls on capital spend; rationalisation of investment management; change management; and redesign and implementation of management information and planning processes. This resulted in cost savings in excess of £20m and improvements in supply chain improvements through cuts in inventory costs, purchasing and payables transactions, and procurement costs.

With our help, a public sector organisation completed a multi-year ERP implementation programme that involved facilitating operations improvement across multiple locations. At the end of our engagement with the organisation, the programme had added £26m to the bottom line through efficiency improvement. The mentoring engaged leaders and staff across the organisation and the mentors conducted workshops and trainings for 1800 plus line managers and front-line staff. To embed the changes and the benefits realised we created 8 Centres of Excellence around core business disciples including internal organisational change management and we developed and rolled out a model for continuous improvement.

With a non-departmental public body organisation, our Implementation Mentor coached the CEO, Chair and Programme Sponsor on the implementation journey and built organisational confidence and participation in the ERP implementation and the development of new intelligent information management systems.