Euro Conversion Programme

Merrill Lynch


Merrill Lynch was managing the Euro Conversion Programme in 1998. Eleven European Currencies converted to the Euro and David managed a team which converted the Equity Derivatives books and records. Over £15 billion was transferred and with an error rate of less than 0.005% it was the most successful conversion for Merrill Lynch Europe.

Process and Organisational Change

Multinational Petrochemical Company


David put together a team of process and organisational change consultants to work with the clients’ internal project team to help align an operational unit to a new global organisational structure. The re-structure resulted in a carefully planned, transparent and large scale redundancy programme. The client wanted to safe guard against people leaving the organisation and leaving it exposed because of a lack of the right skills and experience in safety critical roles. The team helped transition the organisation back to base business (a safe operating model), designing new roles, resource models, knowledge transfer and over 650 business improvement ideas. Tangible benefits were estimated to be in the order of £5 million as a result of the teams’ direct input. This represented a 500% return on investment.

Customer Focus


Petrochemical Company


David and one other consultant worked in the customer services department to work out how sales people could spend less time dealing with administrative tasks and more time with customers. In just four months 40 improvement ideas were generated and implemented. The tangible results were cost savings of just over USD 500,000 and over 1,000 hours of sales time freed up. The cost savings alone represented an ROI of 200%.

Efficiency and Improvement Value


Telecommunications


David worked with a lead consultant in the Billing group of a major telecommunications organisation to identify improvement opportunities across the group. Over a 12 month period over £1.2 million in measurable improvement value was generated. Much of it was direct savings by reducing the amount of rework or duplication of effort. The key to the success of the project was open and unbiased communication and workshop facilitation.

Process Transformation


Banking


David deployed a small team into a major European Bank to help with their transformation of their HR function. As a result of the process work the team undertook the bank adopted the new model and met its 12 month targets in 6 months. For the first time in its history the bank had agreement across four subsidiary brands about how the core HR processes worked.

In 1998 11 country currencies were moving to the Euro. David assembled and managed a team within a global banking group to transfer some £15 billion in assets across 11 currencies to one currency. Over 1 million transactions were processes in a 24 hour period with an overall error rate of 0.05% (approximately 500 transactions). The project was rated the most successful in the UK.

Publishing


David assembled a team that was asked to look into a critical business process and identify where it was failing the business. The process had been reviewed each year for the past 10 years and very little improvement had been realised. The consulting team identified the core problems and what they cost the business and over a 9 month period helped 6 different internal groups shape a smooth running process. The perceived cost savings were in excess of £2 million – an ROI of 2000%.

Local Government


David and one other consultant put a training programme together for a cash strapped local government organisation. The core requirement was to train a number of people in how to identify and implement simple process improvement. The work was on completed 2 days short of the budget (18 days) and over the next 12 months the internal team used their new skills to deliver over £400,000 in improvement value. The head of the team became the Head of Process Improvement and Change for the Local Government body. The cost to benefit ROI was 2,000%

UK Utilities Company


David deployed a team to help this organisation with a major outsourcing programme. The teams’ role was to ensure the organisation understood what it was outsourcing by documenting the organisational processes. Internal people were trained to support the programme and over 12 months documented over 1400 processes and captured them into an online knowledge base. An SAP project followed the process capture exercise and SAP themselves stated that as a result of the outstanding process work the organisation had completed they had saved themselves over 6 months of blueprinting work and £3 million in consulting fees. Based on these savings the ROI was 600%.