A global animal protein company with $6 billion in annual revenue had a cost problem. Spending was out of control across nearly every department and region. And the company did not have adequate tools to benchmark it against external best practices, nor did they have sufficient visibility into how teams spent their time.
While each budget owner could defend their own line items, no one could see the whole picture. Leadership asked us to help them reduce spending across the entire organization, quickly, without having to grind through it department by department.
We started by making spending legible. We mapped the time and energy teams put into each activity and made it available in their software so they could actually have something legible to work with. The process surfaced three kinds of leakage: idle capacity, low-productivity activities, and waste buried in contracts.
Savings goals were then negotiated area by area with the managers who owned the budgets, and improvement actions were defined and implemented against those goals. A dual-ownership governance model gave each savings target two owners. And incentive mechanisms tied manager accountability to keeping costs down after the cuts.
To make it all happen we leaned on several tools. A digital ZBB platform for prioritizing spend by area, RPA and BPMS to automate time and workflow tracking, algorithms to balance transport and benefits costs, telecom and cloud contract cleanup, and AI and IoT for energy and lighting efficiency.
$201M in savings over 16 months, with the worked database optimized by 6.5%.
The headline number came from moving every line at once:
Cost programs usually fail after the initial cuts, as spending creeps back, but we planned for that from the beginning. Savings goals were negotiated with the managers who owned the budgets instead of imposing on them. The incentive structure made keeping costs down personally worthwhile. And the dual-ownership governance meant every target had multiple people watching it. The digital tools were what enabled us tofind the money, but the governance is what allowed the company to make the changes last.