The Finance function within a global technology company's India business unit faced significant operational challenges. Recent growth in the India market strained already inefficient and manual business processes and systems. Leadership dissatisfaction with function performance reached a tipping point when performance began to limit growth. The Country President and Global Head of International Finance asked Axiom to evaluate the function's organization design and determine changes necessary to:
- Quickly improve the Finance function's performance in serving its customers and,
- Increase capacity of the function to support expected future growth in this most important emerging market.
Over a period of 12 weeks, Axiom applied it’s “fast-cycle” organization design approach with the Finance Team to:
1) Identify current and expected future business requirements associated with the India business' strategy and growth plan,
2) Articulate the primary lines of service expected from the Finance function to support current and future requirements and define service level agreements (SLA) for each,
3) Identify the organization design issues that caused current function underperformance and model future process capability/capacity to determine if the function, as currently designed, could effectively enable expected growth,
4) Develop a detailed understanding of 15 current business processes (in Accounts Payable and Compliance/Tax Reporting lines of service) and identify specific actions to improve cycle time, work quality, capacity, and workforce utilization and ensure compliance with all company and regulatory requirements,
5) Redesign current business processes and "pressure test" their capacity and capability to ensure that each could deliver expected process performance,
6) Develop a comprehensive plan to ensure expected performance improvements would be achieved within 3 months of implementation.
- Process capability improved in 15 Accounts Payable and Compliance/Tax Reporting processes while also ensuring 100% on time performance, accuracy, and regulatory compliance,
- Function capacity increased through process improvements that reduced existing workloads for key roles by 38%,
- Process cycle time improved by 5-30% across the 15 redesigned business processes.