Working Capital Optimisation

Releasing excess levels of cash tied up in working capital represents the cheapest form of finance available to a company. CFOs are increasingly being tasked with optimising working capital performance. However, maintaining control of working capital as companies increasingly look to grow, investing in new products, international diversification and M&A activity can be extremely challenging.

To deliver a desired level of improvement requires an approach focused on dealing with the underlying issues, which can range from the quality and appropriateness of commercial terms through to the internal ‘self-help’ available through improved process and control. The breadth of operational and professional experience in our team enables us to influence parts of the wider organisation such as sales, procurement, operations and logistics who all have a major part to play in any effort to reduce working capital.

Our proven methodology drives accelerated identification of the issues with quantification of the benefit case. Potential improvements are prioritised based on value and speed to deliver, working with management to design and implement the solutions. Our services include:

  • 100 day working capital and cash flow planning
  • Cash flow forecasting
  • Exit readiness
  • Forecast-to-Fulfil (Inventory)
  • Order-to-Cash (Accounts Receivable)
  • Procure-to-Pay (Accounts Payable)
  • Working capital assessment and reduction

Financial Effectiveness and Transformation

The CFO faces a continuous challenge to create (and demonstrate) value from the finance function. They must decide on the extent to which finance processes are centralised, owned locally or outsourced, striking a balance between the delivery of insights and the cost-effective management of transaction processing. Unfortunately there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution.

We support the CFO in assessing current practice and in building board-level understanding of, and commitment to, the business case for change. Beyond this, we work on designing and implementing solutions, ensuring that benefits can be effectively tracked and communicated. Our collaborative approach focuses on partnering with client teams to identify the root cause of problems identified as well as providing practical recommendations that are aligned across key stakeholders to provide sustainable outcomes. Specific areas we can provide support to include:

  • Activity-based costing and value analysis
  • Benchmarking
  • Business process outsourcing evaluation
  • Finance function assessments
  • Finance transformation
  • Management reporting
  • Operating model design
  • Process mapping and optimization
  • Shared Service Centre set-up

Business intelligence and analytics

A well-considered analytics strategy provides invaluable insight into your organization and can enable timely business decisions that will reflect market conditions well into the future, along with giving you the power to optimize your operations for future growth and profitability. Our work is characterized as follows:

  • Our end-to-end analytics services are designed to help you enhance organizational capabilities and support forecasting and forward-looking financial and customer models
  • Implement data programs using a full range of technology tools and applications that cover the analytics maturity spectrum
  • Apply advanced techniques to reveal unseen data patterns and anomalies
  • Deploy feasible analytics solutions in a secure, cloud-based environment with advanced data ingestion, security and governance protocols
  • Use industry- and client-specific knowledge and experience coupled with advanced modelling and visualization techniques.

IT advisory

We help our clients prepare themselves for cyber security threats, ensure ongoing protection, react effectively to attacks and drive change to improve their cybersecurity capability. Our IT advisory services include:

  • IT due diligence
  • IT security services
  • Network vulnerability and penetration testing
  • Business requirements definition and business analysis support
  • IT project management support.

How we can help