Large Premium Brewer: Operational Efficiency and Excellence

The client's current budgets and forecasts lacked integrity, consistency and accuracy. Key volume inputs were out of date, and there was a disconnect between operational and financial numbers. In addition, a significant amount of time was wasted on non-value adding activities, including on immaterial line items.

In its efforts to become a high performance business, the client asked Accenture to help design and implement a world-class finance operating model. As part of this initiative, a project team was established to replace the existing budgeting and forecasting solution with one better aligned to the new finance vision as well as global leading practice.

With Accenture's help, the client boldly reinvented its entire budgeting and forecasting solution, reducing the level of detail, streamlining and standardizing the processes and automating them on a single platform. The new budgeting and forecasting solution includes the following:

• Drastic reduction in number of income statement line items (560 to 248).
  
  
• Elimination of two out of three profit forecasts each year.
  
  
• Reduction of budget preparation time from 12 to seven weeks.
  
  
• Budgets are based on more recent data because of shorter process times.
  
  
• Centralization of all global data inputs.
  
  
• All financials are derived from key operational drivers.
  
  
• A fully integrated solution links all financial statements.
  
  
• Automatic generation of a first cut of the budget.

As a result of the new solution, the client continues to achieve higher levels of performance. A 50 percent savings has been achieved due to time freed up for employees to focus on more value-added activities. In addition improved cash flow forecast accuracy has enabled significant annual interest savings through better funding decisions. Financial decisions are now more firmly based on operational reality, further enabling the client on its journey towards being a high performance business.