Examples of Our Engagements: By Client Type

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Consumer Packaged Goods and Services

Account Planning and Forecasting Tools for a Multi-Billion Dollar Direct-Store-Delivery Consumer Goods Client

Our client lacked a consistent process and platform for planning its national and regional sales activity for retailers like Walmart, Kroger, Safeway and Publix. Abacist Group built an activity-based planning & forecasting tool to be used by our client's geographically distributed sales and finance teams.

The tool helped ensure that the 100+ end-users followed a consistent and analytically sound process for planning and optimizing their account activity. The tool identified opportunities to maximize investments in promotional trade spending enabling accelerated net sales growth for both our client and its customers.

Performance Benchmarking for a Fortune 100 Consumer Packaged Goods Client

The client's financial planning & analysis group hired Abacist Group to conduct a performance benchmarking analysis.  The analysis validated for the Board of Directors that the client had performed strongly across a variety of metrics relative to a peer group of more than 20 other blue-chip, publicly traded companies.

Corporate Performance Management Software Implementation for One of the Nation's Largest Dairy Companies

Years ago, our client had implemented expensive on-site CPM software.  They were also using error-prone spreadsheets for their planning and forecasting process.  They were looking to update their CPM software solution with a newer, more flexible, and more affordable solution that could be managed by finance staff without the involvement of their IT department, and at the same time rid themselves of the headaches of planning with Excel in a large organization.  Abacist Group led the successful effort for the client's Adaptive Planning CPM Software-as-a-Service implementation. They now have time to analyze their business rather than simply manage a myriad of spreadsheets.

Pricing, Net Revenue and Trade Promotion Management Optimization

Our consumer staples client offered a collection of national and regional brands.  They also supplied private label products for key retailers.  However, over the course of many years, their investment in their underlying technology infrastructure to monitor, manage, and execute pricing and trade promotions had waned.  As a result, they had also allowed their pricing strategy to devolve, and thus it lacked consistency and efficacy – particularly when dealing with retailers that had a national footprint.

We helped identify key people, process, and technology gaps that prevented our client from leveraging their pricing and trade promotions as a competitive advantage to grow market share, profitability, and cash flow.  We recommended a series of phased key initiatives to help them close their capability gaps, and helped them manage the project deliverables for a sub-set of these key initiatives.

Organizational Design and Best Practice Development for an S&P 500 Corporate Planning Department

Our client had recently been spun-off from a multi-national holding company.  The spun-off client was an S&P 500 company on its own, but lacked many of the corporate functions that the parent company had provided, including a much needed corporate planning department.

Abacist Group worked with the client's newly created corporate planning team to help them incorporate best practices in corporate performance management and help them with their department's organization design, objectives, and overarching business processes.

 

Health Care

Annual Budget Project-Management for a Mid-Market ($600 million) Healthcare Services Provider

Our client had recently acquired a close competitor, and the integration efforts required the full attention and all the excess capacity of the full-time finance staff leaving their executives with limited time to manage the annual planning process.  The client hired Abacist Group to provide them with the extra capacity they needed to deliver a quality annual plan, on time.

Development of M&A and Deal Screening tools

Our client was in a slowly, but steadily growing industry. They were one of the largest players in their extremely fragmented industry, and realized that they needed to perform a series of tuck-in acquisitions and joint ventures in order to reach their strategic plan's goals.

Due to the volume of deals they would be scoping with a relatively small business development team, they needed a very efficient process for scoping the many M&A and JV opportunities available. Abacist Group designed and built tools to help them evaluate deals quickly, efficiently, and consistently.

 

Professional Services

Development of Financial Planning and Analysis Tools for a Marketing and Creative Agency 

Abacist Group worked with a marketing and creative agency to develop a financial planning platform including a rolling P&L forecast.  This tool enabled them to plan to grow in a profitable manner and more than double in size the following year.

Economic and Financial Assessment of an Investment Opportunity for a Multi-Industry Holding Company

When a multi-industry holding company was planning to invest significant time and resources in an internet-based social networking service, Abacist Group developed for them an economic assessment for each of the service lines they were considering offering.

Organization Re-alignment for Professional Services Firm

A professional services firm had been engaged for years by various clients often on retainer.  Their organizational structure reflected the fact that they had only been managed via a view of the total corporate P&L.  This view of the organization hid the inefficiencies related to certain departments, clients, and types of jobs.

 

Abacist Group developed activity-based economic analysis of the various “cells” that made up the professional services organization.  We were then able to identify areas of superior performance and areas of poor performance.  Since most of the client’s resources were people related, we then re-created a clean-slate org chart that took into consideration the economic contribution of each cell.  Then we designed more robust business processes to help the newly drafted organization run efficiently.  With this overhaul complete, the company’s profits increased dramatically.

Strategy Definition and Articulation for a Financial Planning & Wealth Management Firm

A financial planning & wealth management practice was experiencing rapid growth, and needed help defining the building blocks of their strategy.  Abacist Group provided the client with a set of tools, including a strategy map, to help them more clearly articulate and plan their strategy to ensure that the entire organization's efforts were aligned toward executing a common set of goals.

Strategic Guidance for Multi-Unit Restaurant Operator 

A quick-service restaurant operator had grown its chain across two distinct markets. Each market presented unique cultural challenges from both a customer and employee perspective. The client needed to choose whether to focus on one market exclusively and gain deep expertise there, or continue trying to grow both markets simultaneously. Abacist Group provided the client with recommendations regarding the best way to approach growth given the options available, including a potential divestiture.