Company experiencing rapid growth undergoes invoice-to-cash assessment

Client background

This company is a world-leading food provider, operating in both retail consumer packaged goods (CPG) and food service industries with locations across the world and around 20,000 employees. As one of the largest private food providers in the world, this company reaches a revenue of nearly $8 billion annually. They have rapidly grown both organically and through acquisition and have plans to continue growing at a fast pace.

The business challenge

As this company has grown substantially over the past two decades, little investment has been made in the finance team’s processes and technologies. Outdated technology and inefficient processes cause team members to fill gaps with extensive manual work. Due to acquisitions and growth, a lack of standardization exists between their plant and corporate locations forcing the team to leverage a complex landscape of multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other technology systems across locations.

As this company forecasts continued growth, improving finance processes and technologies is imperative to support their ability to continue to scale efficiently. Additionally, their tenured team members have unique expertise built over decades of experience. This prominence of tribal knowledge makes attracting new talent and integrating acquisitions challenging. These struggles are intensified by the various nuances of current processes and the lack of efficient technology.

Baker Tilly was tasked with assessing current processes and technologies and recommending a set of initiatives to drive improvement.

Strategy and solution

The Baker Tilly team held current state workshops, with 20+ company team members across multiple company locations, to document and assess their present-day invoice-to-cash processes and related technology solutions. We built visualizations for both current and ideal future state process flows with accompanying process narratives.

In collaboration with this company’s team, we defined a future state road map to help chart the path for refined processes and new technology to support the invoice-to-cash process. We worked with this company to prioritize current pain points and future state process requirements. Some key business impacts of the engagement include:

• Developed a best-practice invoice-to-cash process model and technology architecture
• Defined an implementation road map comprised of 17 initiatives to enable the invoice-to-cash transformation
• Framed goals and objectives for each initiative through the creation of project charters
• Leveraged Baker Tilly’s functional and industry expertise to identify (ERP agnostic) software solutions to support a future software evaluation process