Meet our DLC Finance and Accounting Consultant,
Juliana Dee, MBA, CPA!
We are thrilled to highlight our Finance and Accounting Consultant, Juliana Dee, MBA, CPA. Juliana has been a valuable part of DLC since February 2020. Read the full interview below to learn more about Juliana’s expertise, her passion for her work, and how she helps her clients thrive.
Hometown: I was born in a small town about an hour’s flight from Jakarta, the largest city and capital of Indonesia. I moved to Los Angeles when I was 16 to study here and have made this big city my home.
Alma Mater: I graduated top of my class at Pasadena City College, then transferred to Cal Poly Pomona, where I also graduated top of my class. I received my MBA from UC Irvine as a Top 10 student.
Favorite things to do outside of the office: I have been active in dog rescue since 2013, volunteering with several local non-profits, networking homeless dogs in social media, giving dogs their freedom rides from shelters, and fostering senior dogs needing a final retirement home. In addition to volunteering, I’ve also started to independently rescue senior and medical dogs, and I hope to start my own non-profit one day.
How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? I am fortunate to have worked with global industry leaders prior to my consulting career, starting at Arthur Andersen, and later at Toyota and AECOM. Having been at Toyota for over 15 years, I had the opportunity to do more than the traditional accounting and FP&A roles. I managed multiple complex operational and system implementation projects, including helping the organization transition to their new HQ in Texas, which proved very relevant to my organizational change management assignments. AECOM is an extremely fast-paced, highly analytical environment, which is valuable experience for a consultant. Having come here as a foreigner and being involved in dog rescue also made me someone who is a flexible and resourceful problem-solver, as well as highly adaptable to new cultures.
What’s a typical workday like for you? I am grateful for the remote and hybrid work arrangements the pandemic has accustomed businesses to. I have become familiar with Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet and found these tools to be highly effective and efficient in connecting with my co-workers at my client. On days I am onsite, I try to take full advantage of face-to-face meetings to deepen my relationships with my co-workers, and to also address and close out matters too complex for email or virtual meetings.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? I love that my work not only allows me to help a client in need, but also helps me to continuously learn new things and work with different projects, systems, cultures, and environment. I am never bored!
What kind of work have you been doing? I was retained at a client for over 3 years, helping senior management with organizational change projects. I worked alongside the Internal Audit SVP to transform the department to a risk-based audit planning approach vs. traditional cyclical audits. This includes implementing new processes to report, monitor, and partner with business units, as well as restructuring the department. At the same client, I helped the Controllership group execute the transition of Order-To-Cash transactional accounting processes to a Shared Services center, ensuring day-to-day tasks are not interrupted, while also overseeing that transition milestones (e.g., SOP documentation, training and shadowing sessions) are on track. I implemented tracking and issue logs to hold the team accountable to our deliverables and address rising issues promptly, while continuing to motivate my team. After the successful transition, I helped the Controller and Assistant Controller implement a governance process around the Shared Services center, to monitor their performance and high-priority issues.
Where did you deliver the most value to your client? The projects I have been working on are not a common experience for Accounting and Finance professionals, so they were not only initially unfamiliar to me, they were also unfamiliar to the senior management team I was working with. My previous project management experience helped me independently identify areas of risk that needed to be addressed and create my own work plan with minimal direction. The management team appreciated my initiative and trusted that I would promptly communicate and involve them on serious issues.
How have you brought organization and solutions to environments with a lack of reporting infrastructure or inefficiencies? A major system implementation project where I was the functional Project Manager addressed this very issue. The legacy warehouse system uses complex Cobol programming and sends monthly summaries to the accounting system, so when variances or discrepancies arise, it was not possible for the Accounting team to drill through to the details to determine the root cause without involving IT. A multi-divisional project was launched to decouple the business rules in the legacy system and create a data warehouse to store the detail transactions and marry them to the accounting transactions. Along with a user-friendly query system, Accounting users would be able to independently research discrepancies and address them promptly. As Project Manager representing the Accounting division, I ensured the Accounting owners accurately and completely captured their requirements, while I worked with Operations and IT to ensure these requirements were communicated and implemented correctly. I developed and executed test cases to capture any issues with the implementation, and I raised critical issues to the executive committee, including a missed requirement uncovered during testing that I helped to resolve. I also trained and rolled out the new query tools to the Accounting team to promote successful adoption of the new system and processes.
What’s your process? In my Shared Services implementation project, my role was not only to backfill as Senior Manager to ensure day-to-day responsibilities were met during the implementation, but also oversee that the transition efforts were on track. The Order-To-Cash process was new to me, as was the implementation efforts. I supervised a staff of 14 employees and temps, only one of whom was college-educated with basic Accounting knowledge, and all but two would be retained post-transition.
When diving into something new, I use existing resources, such as documentation and hands-on cross-training with the staff, to immerse myself in the existing processes, then capture the scope of the work via documentation. In this project, to familiarize myself with the day-to-day tasks, I worked closely with the staff to gain an understanding of their different roles and with the team supervisor to map out the accounting processes. I leveraged existing worklists and documentation and updated for gaps identified in conversations with the staff, to develop a comprehensive matrix of 140 subprocesses the team was responsible for. This matrix became a tracking list to monitor day-to-day deliverables, track the completion of SOP documentation and reviews, as well as the training efforts. We had to submit a standard SOP format, and I performed a thorough review for consistency in quality and sufficient details, jumping in to re-write SOPs if needed, or scheduling a review with the staff to ensure clarity, completeness and accuracy. Within 4 months of joining the team, I was able to consistently close the month and submit SOPs for all subprocesses in the standard format on schedule.
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