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Clarify the management guidelines to improve dialogue flow between the group and subsidiaries

At start

How to improve the flow and the efficiency of work between entities within a big group? How to depolluate the work meetings from lack of understanding between the participants, who use an “almost the same” vocabulary and tools? How to make sure not to spend half the time “render comparable figures”?

We support a big luxury group in a program targetting to provide a dozen brands (just as many headquarters, plants in 10 countries, 400 retail stores on the 5 continents) with a common management frame of reference, prior to the set up of a common IT system.

We offered an approach engaging around fourty representatives of accountants and management accountants from all the brands and all the areas.

The steps along the way

Analyze the current account plans of the various brands and their variations in the 4 geographical areas.

Quickly formalize a first deliverable:

  • a proposal of the common financial information definition, KPI and their calculation methods,
  • an underscoring of the differencies with the prior practices of the 8 brands.

Animate the workshops with the headquarters of the 8 brands and the brand representants in each of the 4 geographical areas on the gaps of the proposal (2 to 3 iterations).

Arbitrate on the residual hard spots in attendance of all the participants.

Set up a pilot in the America zone (80 retail stores).

Key factor success

Draw up a list of the tensing situations experienced with the concerned parties in order to raise awareness on the urgency to change and to start working on the most critical points.

Offer a mock-up engaging a collaborative construction approach, each person involved could offer modifications.

Avoid to launch a prescriptive, technical and centralised work, but focus on an engaging approach.

From then

All the accountants and the management accoutants in the world share a “finance book” which:

  • eases the work of the accountant processing centers,
  • offers a common basis to the whole IT systems,
  • enables the dialogue between different brands, subsidiaries abroad and the Group.

Accountant notions, management indicators and financial processes made more relevant thanks to this harmonization work.

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