Swedish Match: Enterprise Performance Management Framework

Swedish Match is a global supplier of smoke-free tobacco products, cigars, pipe tobacco and lighting products.

The smoke-free tobacco products market began to attract new competitors and Swedish Match customers had become steadily more demanding. Younger consumers were less brand loyal than older consumers and had become accustomed to products that met their changing needs.

It was clear to Swedish Match that the company had to move from a product-centric to a customer-focused approach. It also needed to understand the expectations of its investors better, and to meet those expectations.

Key to this transformation was improving Swedish Match’s enterprise performance management capability. The criteria by which performance across the company was planned and measured had to be aligned with strategic goals and resource allocation and forecasting needed to become more robust and forward-looking. Swedish Match asked Accenture to help design an integrated enterprise performance management strategy and framework across the Northern Europe region.

A team from Accenture’s Finance and Performance Management service line used the Accenture Enterprise Performance Management Diagnostic Tool to understand the company’s current position, its future aspirations and drivers for change. Accenture also used its Total Return to Shareholders Mapping Method to assess Swedish Match’s current financial performance.

Accenture then worked with Swedish Match to develop an enterprise performance management framework. The team worked on developing better long-range planning and forecasting processes to help Swedish Match build business cases for meeting investor expectations.

Accenture then helped Swedish Match develop a culture centered on creating value.

A network of Swedish Match employees helped colleagues with practical questions. How individual decisions affect the overall strategic outcome for the company was communicated via innovative methods.

Accenture worked with Swedish Match to design and deploy processes that would help measure profitability.

The initiative aimed to enhance profitability by continuously optimizing cost drivers and prioritizing products and markets.

The effort by Accenture and Swedish Match has put in place an essential tool to enable long-term strategic transformation in the drive to attain high performance. The new performance management and planning processes help the company allocate resources based on strategic priorities and increase overall effectiveness and efficiency. The change management program continues to build the new mindset on which long-term success may depend.

Swedish Match has set itself ambitious targets, among them a significant growth in operating income by 2012. The enterprise performance management framework will play a key role in meeting those targets. “By aligning the organization to key business drivers and to a common enterprise performance management framework, Accenture has helped to give Swedish Match enhanced capabilities to execute its growth strategy and increase sustainable shareholder value,” said Jonas Nordquist, senior vice president and managing director for sales (Scandinavia) at Swedish Match.