A global manufacturer serving the agriculture, energy, and industrial sectors was in the middle of a company-wide finance transformation.
Its finance organization had internal team members spread across several concurrent operational priorities, leaving no bandwidth to lead a multi-plant ERP migration, a new joint venture’s reporting requirements, and a long-overdue inventory reconciliation overhaul at the same time.
Our team already had multiple consultants embedded in the client’s finance organization supporting other initiatives. Based on that track record, the company brought DLC in to lead this next phase of the transformation, fully remote, working directly alongside stakeholders across the plant network.
The company’s North American plants were still running on legacy systems that needed to migrate onto a new SAP environment. The migration had to integrate cleanly with the company’s existing SAP functionality while a related SAP upgrade, moving from ECC to S/4HANA, ran in parallel. Any misstep risked disrupting plant-level reporting and delaying the close.
At the same time, the company had entered a joint venture with international partners on a new energy project. The partnership introduced financial reporting requirements the finance team hadn’t previously managed, and more than 200 JV reports needed review before they could support accurate, timely reporting.
Layered on top of both efforts was an inventory reconciliation process that was still largely manual. Reconciliations varied by plant, required unnecessary hand-offs between systems, and pulled finance staff away from higher-value close activities. None of these three initiatives could be deprioritized, and the finance team didn’t have the internal capacity to lead all of them at once.
Our team began with planning and risk assessment, running gap analysis sessions across the plant network to understand where the legacy migration, the SAP upgrade, and the JV reporting requirements would intersect, and where disruption was most likely. From there, we led full UAT cycles for both the SAP upgrade and the new inventory reconciliation process, using a RAID methodology to track issues and coordinating updates to policies, business process narratives, and internal controls along the way. On the JV side, we reviewed more than 200 reports to identify gaps and build remediation timelines for each workstream lead.
Rollout moved in structured waves, starting with onboarding and SME-led training, then weekly touch-points through go-live and hypercare support after. We gathered feedback from UAT teams and end users, built resources to support the transition, and ran lessons-learned sessions after each wave to improve the next. Throughout, our team kept direct, frequent communication with the client, so the migration, the upgrade, the JV reporting build-out, and the inventory reconciliation work all moved forward together rather than competing for attention.
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