Chief Financial and Human Resources Officer (Venture Capital)

Initial situation

The company is a multinational that manufactures and markets machinery for the food industry. It is owned by a European private equity fund, which is currently optimizing its operations and pursuing both organic and inorganic growth.

As part of this optimization process, the company has begun implementing SAP in all its subsidiaries.

In Spain, the objective is to implement SAP and merge three companies with similar activities and complementary geographical scope, all belonging to the same fund.

The Client wants to separate daily financial activities from transformation projects to ensure faster execution.

The Company contacts the partner ofSenior Management Worldwidefrom his country of origin, and isQMT, QMT’s exclusive partner in Spain, who provides the interim manager and performs local project supervision.

The project is structured in 3-month periods, which can be extended until the objectives are achieved.

Project execution

Throughout the project, the Company decided to increase the initial scope, adding the following responsibilities:

• The need to replace the Chief Financial Officer has been identified. Consequently, the interim Chief Financial Officer must assume the financial management of the largest of the three companies to be merged. This includes negotiating the separation process, searching for a new Chief Financial Officer, and providing training for the new officer over a two-month period.
• In the final third of the project, the Company tasked him with implementing cost synergies identified during the merger process and the SAP implementation. During this stage, he assumed the role of Human Resources Director, negotiating voluntary redundancy agreements with employees affected by duplicate or obsolete positions, and managing relations with the unions.

Regarding the SAP implementation, the interim manager identified cultural change as one of the key aspects of the project, since the organization was accustomed to working in a very manual way. This shift in mindset brought about by the SAP implementation represented a profound change in their way of working. Consequently, he designed a work plan involving the different areas of the company. The plan aimed to ensure that all areas benefited from the implementation in terms of efficient time management and greater control over all aspects of the company’s administration and operations.

To support this strategy, identify and incorporate into the work plan the optimization of work processes in areas such as sales and operations, which involves implementing simple tools for creating work orders and processing travel expenses. These improvements were not included in the initial scope.

Regarding the merger of the group’s companies in Spain, the interim manager is seeking specialized legal advice to define the roadmap and implement it as quickly as possible. Given the impossibility of auditing interim accounts while SAP is being implemented, the interim manager proposes, and the Company approves, that the merger be executed once the annual accounts have been closed and audited.

Results

After 10 months of the project, the following are some of the most important achievements:

• Successful implementation of the ERP within 5 months.
• Create a process for late billing from the technical department, increasing billing by 50%.
• The creation of an individualized profit center to monitor the activity of the technical department, which was essential to supporting machinery sales, but for which there was no reliable information on its profitability. The initiative confirmed that it was not only not a loss-making area, but quite the opposite.
• Implementation of computer tools to automate the preparation of work orders and the management of travel expenses.
• The audit was closed without qualifications, which demonstrates that the financial function had been carried out correctly.
• Training of the new Chief Financial Officer over a period of 2 months.
• Preparation of all the necessary documentation to start the merger process once the accounts have been prepared.
• Implementation of the synergy plan designed by the Company.