The client’s chal­lenge

• A major European utility company has recently been dive­sting a large share of its busi­ness to free up invest­ment resources needed to grow their other busi­ness port­folio, e.g. within rene­wa­bles.
• As a result, the number of employees working in busi­ness opera­tions roles decreased substan­ti­ally. However, the number of people employed in staff func­tions (IT, Finance & HR) as not decreased to the same extent.
• The high costs of staff func­tions had become an issue as the market deve­lop­ment with signi­fi­cant price erosion put addi­tional pres­sure on company profit margins.
• There­fore, the Execu­tive team decided to initiate a review of all its staff func­tions to find new more effi­cient ways of working and to reduce costs signi­fi­cantly.

What were diffi­cul­ties?

• Defi­ning the cost base­line for the indi­vi­dual staff func­tions has been a time-consuming task because roles and respon­si­bi­li­ties are not defined in a consi­stent.
• The needed bench­mark would have taken way to long and the risk of compa­ring ‘apples to oranges’ would have been to high.
• A ‘cheese slizer approach’ was not suffi­cient, that was way a funda­mental re-thin­king of ways of working was needed.
• Agreeing on to what extent the future role of corpo­rate staff func­tions should be to steer and govern only, or if provi­ding services to the busi­ness.
• Deter­mi­ning respon­si­bi­li­ties for taking out iden­ti­fied savings related to initia­tives that focus on cross busi­ness area oppor­tu­nities e.g. process harmo­ni­za­tion and simpli­fi­ca­tion.
• Setting up an appro­priate way of tracking imple­men­ta­tion of program initia­tives.

Inno­va­tive approach

• The needed bench­mar­king study was outsourced and performed by an expe­ri­enced global consul­tancy (13.000 bench­marks). There­fore, the study itself took only a couple of weeks to complete.
• The bench­mark consul­tancy avoided compa­ring incom­pa­rable factors to the largest extend possible while focu­sing not only on cost but also on equa­lity, effec­tiveness and effi­ci­ency.
• A program manage­ment team was set up consi­sting of internal resources and external consul­tants to analyze the current situa­tion and develop a trans­for­ma­tion plan.
• The bench­mark was only used by execu­tive manage­ment groups to decide on cost reduc­tion targets. Getting the right people on the team has been key to drive the program forward.
• The people assi­gned to the program project team are all senior employees with exten­sive leadership and func­tional area exper­tise as well as strong internal networks. They have had the ability to hit the ground running and quickly add value to various critical issues that have come up during the fast-paced work process.
• After a bench­mark study of the effi­ci­ency and effec­tiveness of the company’s staff func­tions combined with other internal cost data a reduc­tion of the combined cost by 30% was targeted.

Impact and results

• A common view in the Execu­tive team and within the orga­ni­za­tion what needs to be deli­vered from the program and why was gained.
• The necessary initia­tives to achieve the 30% target has been iden­ti­fied. During the coming two years, these initia­tives will be imple­mented and during 2020 the cost reduc­tion shall be deli­vered.
• Enga­ge­ment among many employees in iden­ti­fying and detailing initia­tives to reach the overall ambi­tion as well as signi­fi­cant savings poten­tials have been iden­ti­fied within most of the staff func­tions IT differs from func­tion to func­tion among the 28 staff func­tions in scope of the program.
• To achieve the target some services will need to be scaled down. Service levels in general shall not be degraded but rather improved through digi­ta­li­za­tion, process rede­sign, clari­fied roles & respon­si­bi­li­ties etc.