Advanced Finance

The Challenge

Founded over ten years ago, this innovative apparel company operates several hundred retail outlets in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, with over 3,000 employees and revenue over $600 million. Facing an increasingly competitive retail environment, the company's CFO sought to capture cost savings and efficiencies through a Shared Service Center that would consolidate accounting operations across 12 countries without sacrificing effectiveness, processing accuracy, or controls. Specific areas of concern included analyzing and benchmarking the company's geographic coverage, procure-to-pay and order-to-cash functions, and analysis of in-source or outsourcing options.

Our Approach

Slalom proposed a transformation engagement to help align the organization with key performance benchmarks and standards using the following phased strategic roadmap:

• Phase I: Vendor management and accounts payable
• Phase II: Credit, cash applications, and sales orders
• Phase III: General ledger, tax, and other core accounting processes

Services provided include research and documentation of business rules, analysis of in-source versus out-source considerations, design of cost/benefit model, and project planning.

The Results

Once Slalom completed an analysis of the client's current situation, we were immediately able to assess the company's total headcount, costing activities, and prioritization models, ultimately completing the project early. The resulting data will become vital to achieving significant cost reductions and optimization of resources globally in 2010, with anticipated net-present-value cost savings totaling almost $15 million for the next seven years.