Transforming global manufacturing operations for sustainable growth

Client background

The company is a global leader in food manufacturing, originally serving a small customer base with limited product offerings. Over time, the company expanded its reach to serve thousands of customers across multiple continents, growing into a highly diversified organization with a complex operational structure.

The business challenge

In its early days, the company had a small, self-contained accounting department, with manual processes and legacy systems designed to support a small business. However, the company had grown significantly, expanding to over 1,000 customers and operating 65 facilities across multiple countries. With this expansion, the company faced challenges managing disparate resources, disjointed processes and outdated financial operations—issues exacerbated by multiple acquisitions.

The company needed to modernize its back-office functions with a digital transformation strategy road map to streamline operations and integrate modern systems to keep pace with their dynamic growth.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly helped the company develop a five-year road map to transform their finance and back-office operations, aligning them with the organization’s evolving needs. The road map included the following key elements:

• Current state assessment: We reviewed the company's finance functions and mapped them against a maturity scale, identifying gaps and areas for improvement.
• Future vision: Our focus was on enabling continued expansion through organic growth and acquisitions. The goal was to establish best practices that foster innovation, improve efficiency and drive productivity.
• Prioritization and planning: We worked with the company to define a road map that prioritized improvements in technology, processes and policies. The road map focused on modernizing financial operations, eliminating inefficiencies and implementing new tools to streamline workflows.
• Business case definition: We supported the company in defining the business case for these investments, helping to communicate the value of transforming financial processes to the CEO and other key stakeholders

While the execution is in progress, the company continues to follow the strategic plan and has seen measurable improvements in their operations. Baker Tilly has continued to support additional projects related to this transformation as the company works to enhance their back-office capabilities.