Diaries

I’m meeting the Accunomics team at the client site today. About half the team has been through the assessment phase; the rest of us are joining for the delivery portion of the project. I’ll be working on Profitability Modeling along with two other team members.

I will be leading the supply chain work stream focused on developing a strategic plan for the distribution center (DC) assets. The month is spent bringing an expanded client team up to speed on the work stream goals and the overall transformation effort. There is an aura of ‘doubt’ in the air as a result […]

The workstream manager reviews the findings from the first stage of the project. He’s already built out an assessment-grade profitability model for one piece of the business. It’s built in Access, but can be manipulated for greater visibility using Excel pivot tables. One of the tenants of profitability modeling: creating a fully-loaded P&L for each […]

With the pace needed to maintain our schedule, the new team has quickly moved through the forming-storming-norming stages and is moving at full steam. After the first meeting with the project review board there was little ‘doubt’ left when the question of “how do we go faster?” was brought up for the third time. We […]

There are a few major deliverables that we’ll need to hit during the delivery phase. In addition to turning the assessment-grade model into implementation-grade, we’ll also be building a profitability model for another piece of the business. We begin by meeting with a series of subject matter experts on the client side to get a […]

With the team’s go-forward recommendations approved, we have quickly shifted into execution mode. We now spend the majority of the time working individually with sync points through-out the week. Earlier in the project we spent the majority of the time in meetings where we could develop off of each other’s ideas, but now we have […]

This week, we’ll focus on pulling together a workable transactional data set. With the help of the finance department on the client side, we isolate the relevant data from the general ledger and map it together with other financial reports to add dimensional detail to the numbers. At each step of the process, we reconcile […]

In the last couple of months we have started to see the financial benefits of the changes we put in place. Over the last nine months we have sold several DCs, enacted a multitude of operational improvements, and outsourced non-core functions to third party providers. The amount of change we have accomplished is enormous and […]

One of the more challenging pieces of profitably modeling involves investigating variances and gaps between the transactional data and the reported P&L figures. Generally, if the variance exceeds 1%, we’ll look into what’s driving the difference. This week, the focus is on revising our model to account for these variances.

The Accunomics team assembled at the client site today. Reviewed our objectives, deliverables, workstreams, and the client’s business. Attended presentations from the client. The team went out to a drinking dinner (!) with the entire client management team (traditional Chinese/Korean/Japanese way of getting to know each other) – great fun, although we tried our best […]