OCFO Transformation Unlocks $15 Million in Value and Expedites Close 50% for Public BioTech Firm 

Challenge 

The finance function of a rapidly growing, publicly traded biotech company was struggling to keep pace with change and needed additional support to develop an 18-month digital transformation roadmap.  

Current-state processes were manual and time-consuming, which had several immediate and negative downstream effects. Delays in core finance activities were adding unnecessary costs to otherwise routine tasks, leading to employee fatigue and vendor/customer frustration.  

The company continued to add incremental headcount to address the increasing complexity, volume, and speed of business changes necessary to evolve and fuel growth. But without fixing underlying process and technology inefficiencies, the firm’s finance challenges weren’t being solved. In fact, they were compounding exponentially. 

It was time for a new approach. 

How We Helped 

To overcome issues with data management, consolidation, financial reporting, and growth scalability, leadership desired technology solutions that could enable top-down modeling and persona-based financial and operational reporting. 

Public-company compliance remained top of mind, so the ability to seamlessly integrate future acquisition targets was imperative.  

CrossCountry Consulting’s finance transformation experts led a future-ready workshop to assess opportunities for efficiency across Order-to-Cash (O2C), Accounts Payable (AP), and financial statement close processes (FSCP). The workshop is a proprietary approach to transformation management that helps organizations design, execute, and deliver on transformation projects.  

Over the course of a two-day interactive workshop discussing current-state challenges and future-state goals, the team prioritized focus areas around: 

• System optimizations.
• Data centralization. 
• Automation. 
• Risk-based process improvements. 

It was these four pillars that would drive transformation success and ultimately deliver positive ROI. To achieve these aims, the company also collaborated on and aligned to a future vision statement and key finance performance metrics that would anchor the mission in the months and years ahead.  

Results 

By developing a transformation roadmap and supporting the implementation of concurrent finance optimizations, the team defined key milestones as well as the path to execute on critical next steps. These detailed recommendations enabled the company to clear project roadblocks, deliver on short- and long-term objectives, and confidently work from a repeatable transformation playbook, resulting in: 

• $15+ million in value potential over 3 years across O2C, AP, and FSCP. 
• 50% reduction in time-to-close by resequencing the close process, optimizing existing usage of Blackline, and re-aligning FP&A and accounting. 
• Procure-to-Pay (P2P) automation systems design for bid process management. 

In addition to these tangible wins, the company also benefitted from an evaluation of top-down, driver-based modeling opportunities through a potential new planning tool like OneStream. These priorities were laid out in a 100-day sprint plan and detailed in future-state blueprints the OCFO could use to build a change coalition and gain buy-in. 

With newfound strategic alignment, a clear transformation roadmap, and positive outcomes already on the books, the company has now built a new framework and culture around future transformation opportunities. As the business continues to evolve, this successful experience will prove invaluable to meeting market, employee, and shareholder demands on an accelerated timeline.