Meet our DLC Finance and Accounting Consultant, Simon Ordever!

Meet our Finance and Accounting Consultant, Simon Ordever! Simon has been a valuable part of DLC Consulting for 2 years! Get to know him better below!

Hometown: I was born and raised in the UK, on the south coast of England, in a city called Brighton.

Alma Mater: I graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a foreign student.

Favorite things to do outside of the office: The creative right side of my brain gives me a certain degree of respite from the professional career that I chose for myself over twenty-five years ago. I enjoy writing poetry and adore musical theater. I also recently scored a small speaking part in a ‘rom-com’ coming to a streaming service sometime next year.

How has your background impacted your experience as a consultant? My international professional background contributes daily to the added value I bring to my clients. I have worked in senior financial roles on four different continents and the cultural diversity of the teams that I have managed in the past have all given me the insights that have contributed to the ‘soft skills” needed to strengthen my technical knowledge.

What’s a typical workday like for you? One of the difficulties of living and working in Los Angeles is sometimes the commute to the client. I have learned more freeway numbers since joining DLC than I ever really needed to know. An early start to the day is imperative. The diverse nature of the businesses that I have consulted in since joining DLC, has been instrumental in keeping me focused daily on the projects at hand. The early start to my workday facilitates the luxury of being able to plan the day ahead and concentrate on the maximum value that my deliverables can give to the clients ‘management team.

What motivates you to wake up and go to work every day? As a more mature consultant, the alternative is far less appealing!

What kind of work have you been doing?  Nearly three decades ago, I, for some unknown reason, chose Cost and Managerial Accounting rather than the more common CPA route. This has resulted in the projects that I handle being as varied as the businesses of the clients that I serve. Mostly inventory valuation-related issues, based around standard costing and variance analysis, (but not limited to that), I excel in communicating financial statement data to Operations managers and, in the opposite direction, converting operational performance data into Cost of Goods Sold valuations.

Where did you deliver the most value to your client? The scarcest resource that I bring to my clients is my experience. The most rewarding aspect of this is sharing that experience with teams generally made up of members who are eager to learn. Mentoring a young team of newly qualified accountants (and sometimes not so newly), especially in something that is often considered to be mundane like Cost Accounting, is an added value that I focus on delivering most.

Linking data to finance and accounting, explain environments that have had lack of reporting infrastructure/inefficiencies and how have you brought organization and solutions-implementation. Most if not all my clients are manufacturing enterprises. To my surprise, many of them, even those that are subsidiaries of larger parent companies or who are portfolio companies within a private equity group, have in the past invested a very limited amount of resources in operationally adequate ERP systems. Recently this has begun to change as new more cost-effective cloud software systems have become more attainable. Being on the ground floor in implementing the Inventory and Costing models in these newly acquired systems, I have been able to help redesign the link between the client, its vendors, customers, its capital investment strategy, and human resource teams.

What’s your process? The process I adopted in the following situation I came across recently consisted of a cumulative multi-million adverse Labor and Overhead manufacturing variance for the first two quarters of the present financial year. This was compared with an adverse variance over the same period last year of approximately one third of the size.

The task to determine the variable factors that went to the root cause of the issue became far more interesting than the thousands of similar investigations I had done before, and that was because….no one seemed to care! This for me is like a ‘red rag to a bull.

The action taken was so much more visceral than opening a suite of Excel files and digging into the Netsuite financial software the client runs its data on.

The cross-departmental team that I gathered, consisting of Operations managers and supervisors, along with the CFO and Chief Accountant, resulted in the team understanding that lower demand, a weaker mix and unplanned machine downtime, had together caused havoc with the cost of sales and in accordance with US GAAP, the quarters’ finished goods valuation needed to be revised upwards.

Looking for a Trusted Partner?

DLC is a professional services firm helping companies drive transformation and growth, one project at a time. Our team provides flexible, efficient, on-demand execution of your financial projects.

What We Do