One of the world’s leading consumer goods and food companies with annual sales above €20 billion, has set its ambition over a 5-year horizon to build a strong, profitable and sustainable growth.
In this context, and among other wide initiatives, the Company has reshaped its whole Performance Management Model allowing better anticipation, agility and collective way of working for answering major business stakes and an environment more and more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA world).
To start these transformations and required adaptations of its performance management model, the Company has chosen to rely on the Beyond Budgeting approach for:
- Better balance & connection between short-term & long-term time horizons
- Clear Company expectations towards every entity through the strategic plan and yearly target setting
- Greater anticipation & visibility through a rolling forecast based on a common set of central assumptions
- More agility in resource allocation through a more robust Sales & Operations Planning sequence & new business reviews dynamic
- More fairness & solidarity through a new short-term incentive integrating more qualitative information
Challenges
Alongside the client, Wavestone has taken up three main challenges:
- Frame and design the new performance management model of the Company: define key characteristics of the new model (strategic plan, financial forecasts, business planning cycle, Sales & Operations Planning process) in terms of process and IS impacts
- Empower and equip the whole organization: ensure appropriation of the model and meet the objections raised, especially in a no-budget world
- Monitor and adjust: by analyzing feedback routines to assess how each model component is appropriated & implemented at each level of the Company
Responses and key success factors
From the design of the new performance management model to its implementation and monitoring at each level of the organization, Wavestone has stepped in through a co-construction approach:
- Buy-in and key sponsorship from the Executive Committee and Top Management regarding ambitions and objectives of the project
- Strong central support, with willingness to empower each division in their new business cycle implementation, for a better appropriation of the new model throughout a transition year
- Co-responsibility shared between Business and Finance, and strong involvement of support functions (Operations, Human Resources)
- Agility and reactivity in the approach, based on a permanent dialog with the organization
