Profitability Improvement

Managing your profitability

As the saying goes: “If your profit margins aren’t rising, chances are your company isn’t thriving”. The truth is, everyone pays attention to profitability, but few companies have a process to systematically manage profits on a day-to-day basis.

Profit management is not a one-time event. It’s a continuous process, starting with accurate costing and profit reports on products, clients, segments, and entities.

When those data points are available, the best performing companies run their business through continuous identification, prioritization, and profitability improvement initiatives. These initiatives go beyond headcount reduction to look at ways to lift top-line growth and eliminate the weeds of bureaucracy.

The profitability management process

We assist companies in assessing the current cost & profit models and implementing a stronger profitability management process through four specific domains of expertise:

Profitability reporting
To make progress, you need to know your baseline situation. Our reporting and analysis experts turn out the necessary reports to uncover your organization’s profitability structure, also revealing its actual drivers.

We create transparency in your cost structure, customer & product profitability and pricing architecture. We then assess the cost of products / services delivery and the productivity of your resources, identifying performance gaps with peers.

Cost model optimization
We help you gain a better understanding of your costs by challenging the model you have in place. Based on our track records within similar organizations and industries, we can pinpoint the main performance gaps and gather the necessary volumetric data and insights to optimize your model.

Customer profitability
To understand which customers are generating the profit for an organization and to avoid symptoms like margin leakage, we create a Cost-to-Serve model (individual activity based customer P&Ls) and use this model as a next step in a customer optimization workshop. Here we share insights on which customers deliver profit to your organization. For underperforming customers, corrective actions will be discussed.

Typical improvement levers are product pricing, change of existing services and / or change of product offering. Depending on the need, the Cost-to-Serve model can then be used to review product complexity and rationalize your product offering through amongst others threshold analyses and product duplicate elimination.

Process- redesign & mindset
In addition to applying our financial playbook of reviewing and reducing the level and pattern of spending and increasing profits, we look at the complexity of work to eliminate or redesign any activities that are not efficient or for which the cost exceeds the value. Next to the process itself, we analyze & improve dimensions such as governance, systems, data and the people involved (their motivation, mindset, skill set), to propose a holistic approach towards profitability improvement initiatives.

Who will support you

Our specific subject-matter expertise, industry knowledge and pragmatic advisory methodologies are delivered by CFO Services, MI&S and Financial Institutions.