An Enterprise Transformation in a Single Year
A decade of paper processes and stale contracts, undone in one year. FX fees down a third, health insurance down 30 percent, 401(k) costs down half.
The situation
An agricultural organization had grown into a serious operation while its back office stayed frozen in time. Core processes still ran on pen and paper: check requests moved through the building as paper forms, and the audit trail was literally a paper trail. Vendor contracts renewed year after year without anyone pressure-testing them. Foreign exchange on international spend ran on contracts nobody had revisited. And the company’s benefit programs, health insurance and the 401(k) among them, had sat untouched for a decade while the business around them changed completely.
What I did
The engagement started the way most of my work starts: as an advisory conversation about where time and money were quietly leaking. Everything that follows landed inside a single year.
The first front was moving processes from pen and paper to digital. The flagship example: paper check requests became digital bill entry, flowing into an approval queue. Operations got limited, purpose-scoped access to the ERP so requests started where the data lives, and automated reporting replaced asking finance and waiting.
The second front was the contracts. I took the vendor agreements to the table with current market knowledge: some got cancelled outright because they weren’t earning their keep, and the rest were renegotiated down. The foreign exchange contracts got the same treatment.
The third front was the decade-old programs. I compared what the business actually needed against what was in place, starting with health insurance and the 401(k), and rebuilt both around today’s company instead of the one that originally signed up.
What changed
Renegotiating the foreign exchange contracts cut currency fees by a third. The health insurance restructuring reduced that expense by about 30 percent, and the 401(k) changes cut plan costs by about half. The vendor list came out shorter and cheaper.
Just as important, the paper went away. Check requests now move through a digital approval queue with a real audit trail, so accuracy went up while the time spent shuffling forms went down. Operations answers its own questions from automated reporting instead of waiting on finance. And all of it happened in one year, which is the part clients find hardest to believe: a back office a decade behind does not need a decade to catch up.