A fast-growing family-owned French business operating in the agricultural industry, with branches, subsidiaries, and joint ventures worldwide, recently acquired a significant business in a neighboring country to enlarge their product catalog. This strategic acquisition was essential for expanding their portfolio and becoming a global player in the seeds market.
Despite their rapid growth, the company's governance processes and tools had not kept pace, leading to a lack of automation and overall system inefficiency. To address the inefficiencies and inadequacies in their ERP system, the company recognized the need for change.
Leveraging synergies
The organization wanted to leverage the acquisition to evaluate, enhance, and harmonize the business processes of both companies to profit from synergies, such as cost savings, improved productivity, greater innovation, and group-wise profit from developed expertise, collectively exceeding the sum of what each entity could achieve independently.
With the documentation of their current (As-Is) processes in a rather fragmented state, the company’s ability to create aligned and unified future (To-Be) processes across all entities was limited. They identified process pain points based on the As-Is processes, but these issues were not validated across the entire organization. As a result, the group faced challenges in finalizing the validated To-Be processes required for their new ERP implementation.
Additionally, the company aimed to leverage this momentum to future-proof the business by adapting to emerging challenges and navigating regulatory changes, including ESG compliance, EU late payment regulations, and e-invoicing requirements. By proactively addressing these trends, they wanted to build a resilient business, ready for the future and the envisioned growth.
Bridging gaps with pragmatic expertise
The company partnered with TriFinance due to a recognized pragmatic and agile approach, along with the ability to translate know-how into do-how. "Know-how" is defined as the understanding required to initiate change, while "do-how" is characterized by the implementation of that knowledge. A knowledge-based approach is transformed into sustainable, integrated outcomes. "Do-how" is delivered through solutions that surpass mere advice, utilizing professionals who combine extensive industry experience with conceptual and methodological expertise.
Furthermore, in ERP implementations, an ERP journey triangle approach is employed, where project ownership is retained by the client. TriFinance acts as the functional analyst, serving as a translator and facilitator between the client and the system integrator, who manages the technical development. This method effectively bridges communication and understanding gaps during ERP implementations.
Additionally, it was proposed to use a BPM tool to capture and visualize all the processes across different domains in an end-to-end manner. The benefits of this approach included greater transparency, improved process efficiency, and better alignment across departments. It also helps identify bottlenecks more easily, supports more effective decision-making, and facilitates continuous improvement by providing all stakeholders with a clear understanding of the processes.
This tool would also facilitate involvement and interaction of the different participants (business process owner and operational team) in the design of the new processes, necessary to ensure onboarding of all stakeholders in the change process. This methodology greatly appealed to the client, as they recognized the challenges of communication and bridging the cultural and linguistic gaps between the two entities.
The preparation phase
There are typically several sequential phases, within the methodology of a waterfall project, for an ERP implementation:
- Preparation
- System Design
- Implementation or Coding
- Integration & Testing
- Deployment
- Hypercare
Support was requested in the first phase of the ERP implementation, the preparation phase. This initial phase included designing future business processes (harmonization and automation of processes using best practices) and collecting and documenting all business and system requirements. This involved extensive workshops with stakeholders to understand their needs and expectations. The expected outcome was a validated harmonized To-Be process for different business domains and a comprehensive requirement specification document that would serve as a blueprint for the entire project.
For this first phase, their current way of working was reviewed and the future business processes were designed, considering best practices, their business requirements and pain points, and the new EU regulations. Additionally, it was needed to capture roles and responsibilities, business and functional requirements, system landscape, master data points and their dimensions.
The domains in scope were:
- Source to pay, order to cash, and record to report
- Planning, production, inventory, and logistics
- Treasury, tax, intercompany, and cost accounting
Harmonizing future business processes
To design and outline the interdepartmental and cross-functional future business processes, and to capture the business and functional requirements such as the system landscape, roles & responsibility matrix (RACI matrix) and master data points a dedicated Business Process Management (BPM) tool was used. This tool supports comprehensive documentation of processes, flowchart visualization, reporting, and gives valuable insights.
“Using this tool proved to be a game-changer for understanding and harmonizing future business processes, especially given the client's insufficient understanding of inter-departmental and cross-functional activities,” says Sara Deleu, CFO Services project consultant at TriFinance.
Our methodology involved aligning subprocesses and visualizing them, enhancing the client's understanding of the end-to-end concept and allowing for dynamic stakeholder engagement. This transformation turned scattered processes into valuable insights and a coherent end-to-end concept.
Furthermore, a team with diverse expertise and multilingual capabilities, covering all relevant processes and functional domains, was selected for this project. This team was supported by experts to ensure the project's outcomes were translated in a structured manner and presented with clear and understandable visualizations.
In practice, workshops were led to challenge the stakeholders to harmonize and design the future processes. They collaborated closely with the TriFinance specialists to capture the information in the BPM tool, by pragmatically translating the business processes in the system. This continuous interaction fostered mutual understanding, business insights, and methodological refinement.
A feasibility assessment was conducted amongst stakeholders, Business Process Owners (BPO’s) and the promoter. In different workshops TriFinance specialists engaged and challenged stakeholders and BPO’s to assess the feasibility and desirability of the To-Be processes.
An unstructured library of information
To ensure proactive issue resolution with the sponsor and program manager, the project management team was strengthened. This additional effort secured a transparent and timely communication with steerco, effectively supporting the program governance challenges related to planning, availability, communication, and roles and responsibilities.
By fostering better alignment between TriFinance, the sponsor and the steering committee, there is a significant opportunity for more effective collaboration and project outcomes.
To address the previously mentioned quality of some of the As-Is documentation, the experts collaborated with stakeholders to rework the documentation, aiming to understand and capture their current workflows and pain points. The first step was to thoroughly review and question the As-Is documentation. “It was difficult to read and comprehend the delivered As-Is documentation, it was a big library of unstructured information in which you could easily get lost,” says Joke Van Belle, CFO Services project consultant at TriFinance. “The flowcharts were overly detailed and all-encompassing, lacking division into sub-processes. This resulted in documents that were unreadable and unprintable.”
Any unclear parts were resolved through workshops or ad-hoc meetings. In situations where no As-Is documentation existed, discussions were initiated using a generic flowchart to map and capture the current processes.
Fostering change and digital mindset
According to Benjamin Celis, CFO Services senior project manager and O2C coordinator at TriFinance, this approach was necessary to foster and drive the change and digital mindset throughout the company and to bridge the cultural differences to harmonize their way of working.
When we started the project, we quickly realized that the stakeholders focused too much on solutions, not on processes. The adoption and nurturing of a digital mindset, by embracing agility, continuous learning, and adaptability, was necessary to drive innovation and effective collaboration.
At the end of this phase one, the BPO's respective business processes were validated as per initial expected delivery date. The client was now able to visualize their harmonized end-to-end processes in a standardized way which is available in a single source of truth. All their (sub)processes were built in a relational database which now allows them to visualize all the interconnections via flowcharts, describing the process activity description, the related business and functional requirements, policies and procedures, RACI, documents and their respective process activity risk and controls.
