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CASE STUDY
Operations

Finance retools for growth

Stanley Black & Decker optimizes finance operations for competitive agility.

Call for change

Industrial giant Stanley Black & Decker (SBD) has grown through constant innovation and a growth mindset. Its enviable market share is a byproduct of its ability to place the right bets—not only on new products and ways of working, but also on various growth platforms including strategic M&A transactions.

Most recently, SBD placed its bet on digital technologies. Achieving digital transformation and various growth initiatives —posed a challenge. The objectives were closely linked since a strong digital foundation was necessary to facilitate faster and smoother integration of acquired businesses. The company needed a unified, standardized approach to unlock the full potential of its various growth initiatives. Finance was one of their key areas of focus. Rapid growth in previous years had resulted in a fragmented finance operating model that was difficult to navigate and impacting the speed of and agility required to compete in a volatile and competitive market.

Reinventing enterprise operations

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When tech meets human ingenuity

Stanley Black & Decker and Accenture worked together to create a finance operating model that was agile, resilient and able to support their acquisition strategy.

Procure to Pay (PTP), Order to Cash (OTC) and Record to Report (RTR) processes, as well as master data management and even customer service processes, were consolidated and standardized in new managed service centers—and supported by a new SAP S/4 HANA platform. In the area of Business Analysis and Reporting, the team implemented a new data strategy and data governance rules, a new system (based on Hyperion and SAP technologies) to harmonize data, and a Center of Excellence to strengthen analytics. Today, the team is using SynOps—Accenture’s AI-powered automation platform—to identify opportunities to further streamline and accelerate tasks with automation and artificial intelligence. 

Making finance a predictive powerhouse

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A valuable difference

Stanley Black & Decker has established a strong and robust digital core and a finance operating model that centralized accounting processes, improved accounting efficiencies, created touchless transactional processes, and generated up to $70 million in business value.  

80%

accounting processes centralized

47%

improvements in accounting efficiencies

50%

touchless transactional processes facilitated

$70M

business value generated.

Every area of finance has benefited. For example, order-to-cash has seen 62% ($58 million) reduction in open deductions. In procure-to-pay, the accounts payable debit balance has plunged from $25 million to $2.5 million. And in record-to-report, the value of open intercompany items declined by $324 million. Importantly, the investment in their finance organization has made it easier for SBD’s finance organization to contribute to the company’s ambitious growth agenda.