THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY OF IMPLEMENTING CONTROL IN A BUSINESS IS BY DEPLOYING TECHNOLOGY WHICH ADDS VALUE TO THE TEAM

Previous Preen Partners work streams

  • Global Operations Metrics for an Investment Bank - defining the metrics and implementing the system to capture and consolidate daily.

  • Management - Headed up the European Operations Control for a Tier 1 Investment Bank

  • Software - Developed an Active Metrics monitoring system deployed in Operations in 3 Tier 1 banks

  • 3rd Party Deployments - Deployed Brightpearl dashboards across manufacturing and retail organisations

  • Outsourcing - via the outsourcing of German settlements allowed an investment bank to start trading in half of the time at 20% of the original cash requirement.

Our thoughts

Control in your business can be negative when it stifles enthusiasm and innovation. Many successful start-ups flourish because there is a lack of control. Seed funders often want to see this 'sand-pit, 'fast fail', innovative environment as it encourages ideas and cuts down on the time to deliver. Why does this work in start-ups? Trust and a single goal. In a successful small organisation everyone knows each other, they work massive hours together, they go to the pub together, they talk, live and breathe their business and they solve the problems there and then. If a business grows rapidly or via acquisition new issues arise - different personalities, different management agendas, different platforms, different geographies, and regulations. At this point without a clear shared set of objectives for an organisation and clear managed metrics, the business can go off track very quickly. Once elements in the business start to go wrong everything starts to spiral downwards and efficiency suffers, costs rise, losses increase and at worse regulatory sanctions can happen.

Choose your moment but start early: Developing the key metrics that measure your business' control environment is fundamental. Implementing and reviewing them daily is paramount to staying on track.

Each business is different and there some peculiarities between industries but fundamentally the day-to-day control metrics are the same, whether monitoring cash breaks, stock breaks, balance sheet integrity breaks through to analysing losses and regulatory compliance.