The Strategy Group | Transform Your Business

Challenge

We advised one of the world’s largest petrochemicals companies on a complex end-to-end separation project. This involved c.3,000 staff across 47 countries, carving out five legal entities including 70 manufacturing plants and c.120 business applications with a new SAP ERP solution. Our client faced the challenge of managing 640 project staff across the globe to extract real-time reporting from complex Excel-based project plans. Furthermore, the granular planning required meant the use of distributed Excel project plans with local decision making was not feasible. The SAP ERP separation posed challenges due to the environment being shared by multiple business units, with limited SAP skills in the client’s internal IT team.

Approach

We mobilised a multi-disciplinary team with skills across all areas of technology separation, configuring a proprietary digital service that provided reporting and management visibility.

Our specialist developed custom-built workflows, use-cases, and executive dashboards across the transaction to progress and monitor issues in real-time, with automated escalation.

We enabled a similar digital service to support data validation with full workflow controls and visibility on dependencies between tasks, providing a single source of truth for the client. Other features included real-time reporting and automatic validation completion notifications.

Our tech M&A ERP team executed the carve-out of the SAP instance cross-international market. We used our automated Rapid ERP Scan to discover the SAP solution. Following this, our team engaged with the business and its IT teams to formulate a rapid carve-out solution. We deliver the carve-out in 10 weeks.

Leveraging our ERP data forensics capabilities, we implemented a custom solution (based on Alteryx) to extract, compare and transform data across two systems to support the client with dual-data maintenance requirements.

Our in-house SAP experts managed all aspects of the technical SAP separation and facilitated user acceptance testing and business ramp-down / ramp-up activities during operational cutover.

Benefits

Over 6,500 operational cutover activities were accessed and updated in real-time by 640 project team members across the globe.

We delivered a successful SAP separation in only 10 weeks, with minimal impact on the business and at a fraction of the planned budget.

We were able to optimise the SAP clone environment by selectively copying only required data versus the total at source environment, while our advanced data forensics capability ensured data consistency across systems.

Challenge

Our client, a retail trading company, was facing declining revenues, an increasing cost base, and was struggling to differentiate itself in an increasingly competitive market. The businesses had ambitious revenue and customer growth targets. It was looking for support to review its strategic ambition, redesign its business model and ensure its operating model was set up to support scaling, while also retaining adequate levels of control. This required an end-to-end enterprise-wide programme to transform the client into a data-driven and customer-centric business.

Approach

Our team developed a complex multi-year transformation program, leveraging the expertise of an integrated, cross-functional delivery team with specialists from Strategy, Operational & Regulatory Risk, Technology, Data, People & Change, Finance Transformation and Tax.

We supported the client to articulate a clear strategic ambition and designed a differentiated, customer-centric business model. Tailored to target future customer types, this focussed on ‘making customers better traders’.

The data-driven model enabled hyper-personalisation of the customer journey, significantly improving the experience and the relevance of the value proposition, while a scalable and agile technology architecture was implemented to simplify the historic monolithic, technology system.

Our team worked with the client to design and implement a single global operating model to support the new business model, while addressing gaps in governance to meet regulatory obligations.

At the same time, we improved margins through a sharper focus on the cost-base and closer alignment to an agile business approach.

Benefits

We aligned the client leadership team around one clear strategy, enabling them to focus on driving growth, and designed a market-leading and differentiated value proposition.

We supported the client to develop and launch a proprietary trading platform with a core data infrastructure. In addition, we developed a detailed proposition roadmap for the next three years to enable the continued development of innovative products that build competitive advantage.

The client also benefited from a refined cost base and a redesigned operating model that eliminated functional siloes and aligned business goals at a global level.