Building Materials and Composites

Using regulatory compliance to improve competitiveness.

Project Highlights:

1. Office Kaizen
2. Financial Results

Clients Perspective:

"We must do Sarbanes-Oxley as a legal / regulatory requirement. But compliance and reporting is costing us huge amounts of money every year. There must be a way to consolidate and rationalize our processes so that we are fully compliant, at minimal cost?"

Situation:

Sarbanes-Oxley is a government regulation that requires every corporation doing business in the US to comply with certain financial reporting requirements. Non-compliance is not an option. The cost of compliance for a large corporation can amount to millions of dollars annually. The company wanted an efficient way to consolidate processes and incorporate SOX evaluation, reporting and compliance with operational processes that were already being done. In this way, savings could be achieved through consolidation of processes and elimination of redundant work.

Approach:

• A cross-functional Rapid Improvement Event was designed, chartered and conducted over a two-week period
• Separate work teams were assigned to each of the 16 financial cycles that required SOX compliance
• Work teams were provided standard templates for analysis of their processes
• An Executive Steering Committee (ESC) oversaw all activities
• Each of the work team products were integrated into a comprehensive approach that removed redundancy and closed gaps
• Processes that were already part of day-to-day operations were evaluated for incorporation into SOX requirements and integrated where possible
• External auditors were engaged to ensure all legal requirements were met

Results:

Labor savings from this single workshop resulted in a reduction of 187,000 hours annually! Internal company controls were simplified and streamlined and information accuracy improved. Key financial controls were reduced by 28%. The teams continued to apply the powerful techniques introduced and facilitated by Kaufman Global, resulting in an additional 30,000 hours of labor savings within the following 15 months.

Want to find out more about Kaufman Global's approach and the critical success factors in a project like as this? Contact us.