Stout was engaged by a private equity company to assist one of its portfolio companies with developing and maintaining a robust system of internal controls to mitigate risks and safeguard its assets.

The Problem: Navigating Entity Level Controls and ERP Integration

The company, a rapidly growing distillery, needed assistance assessing and documenting its entity level controls, business process controls, and IT general controls. The company also needed an assessment of its finance organizational structure in addition to recommendations for its implementation of Sage X3.

This engagement was unique due to the client’s recent acquisition of a similarly sized distillery, which leveraged a different enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and various processes (all undocumented across the respective businesses) were performed inconsistently. The company was in the process of integrating a new ERP system (Sage X3) to unify its operations and automate numerous manual tasks. This effort required meaningful responsibility changes within the organization, moving personnel from manual tasks to higher-level analytical roles.

Our Solution: Assessment and Roadmap for Finance Optimization

Our deliverables included risk and control matrices as well as process flowcharts for various business processes, a gap assessment with key observations, a future state roadmap, an assessment of existing resources, and a proposed organizational structure with detailed responsibilities and core skills for the finance function.

The need for cross-discipline expertise heightened the complexity of this engagement. Stout’s Risk Advisory team collaborated closely with the Accounting & Finance Operations team to assess resources, propose a future state organizational structure, develop a roadmap and prioritized listing of the various recommendations to optimize the company’s finance function, and provide guidance on enhancing the company’s control environment.