Dig deeper into working capital analysis

The challenge

Our client, a business services company, required a pre-deal assistance to gain a clearer picture of its business performance and working capital drivers ahead of a disposal process. One of the challenges was to compute metrics (DSO, DPO) at the most granular level (patent code).

One of the client's main concerns was to understand the full lifecycle of a project, from the origination of the demand to the final delivery. Projects have different code name during the process due to heterogenous ERPs.

The challenge was to identify through ERPs (i) the historical performance of sub-categories of patents and (ii) drivers to properly manage the Working Capital at a dynamic level. At the end, we delivered a turnkey solution to the client based on Power BI, including an historical performance et WC analysis.

The outcome

The first step of our work was to clean, with the support of the management, the heterogenous data and provide a solid database with a unique code, milestones date and financial information to structure the data (order, invoice, purchase and delivery dates) at the project level.

The second and final step was to create a dashboard with 2 different purposes:

• Provide the capacity to analyse product performance and sales/margin at the most granular level (from the project to a client).
• Identify the drivers to manage on daily basis the working capital and give comfort on the computed DSO/DPO

At the end, the management had a better view on the sales/margin trends at any level of granularity and more comfort on the KPIs computed through the ERPs.