Experience

Trenegy is a Houston based Management Consulting firm with deep industry and consulting experience in Exploration & Production, Midstream, Drilling and Field Services, Chemicals, Construction, Manufacturing, Banking, and Healthcare Provider Industries.

Strategy for Success

Client Situation A large oil and gas services company was experiencing rapid growth and was considering a number of acquisitions. The CEO had built a new management team to ensure the company was properly led through growth. The new management team was challenged to develop a comprehensive and cohesive strategy for the company. Trenegy was asked to help facilitate the development of the strategy and associated roadmaps.

Our Response Trenegy’s team began by evaluating the current state of each department and identifying each group’s core competencies. They then measured each core competency against leading practices in the industry. Trenegy used these benchmarks as a foundation to develop a maturity model for the company. This maturity model illustrated the end goal that each part of the organization needed to work towards. The project team led management through several workshops using Trenegy’s ACE method to drive collaboration and innovative thought in developing the overall corporate strategy. The project concluded as Trenegy developed a detailed roadmap for the executives to use in leading the organization towards its goals.

Result The maturity model developed for the services company gave executives insight into how the business compared with peer companies. This allowed management to pinpoint and prioritize areas of the business that needed the most improvement. The executives now had a clear strategy to mature the business in a precise and planned manner.

Keeping Reporting Afloat

Client Situation: A growing oil and gas production company had experienced rapid growth making the company a global leader in the floating production storage and offloading sector. As a fast growing organization, they quickly realized the current financial planning, reporting and consolidations processes were crippling the finance organization. The executive were frustrated with the lack of information received from finance and the inability to consolidate the financials on a timely basis.

Our Response: Trenegy was hired to develop a roadmap for their future planning, reporting and consolidations environment. Trenegy’s team leveraged our deep experience with similar companies in the oil and gas industry to establish an overall data model for the organization. The team worked with the organization’s leadership to integrate the company’s reporting requirements along with industry best practices into an overall plan and roadmap. Using this roadmap, Trenegy was hired to assist with the implementation of the new system, leveraging Hyperion’s toolset.

Result: The organization was able to rollout a standardized set of reports for the organization and automate the consolidations and planning processes. The standardized financial systems gave the finance organization credibility with management and investors while providing the controls needed to support their rapid growth.
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The Margin Games

Client Situation: The Leadership team of a global chemical company was faced with the lack of visibility into how changes in raw materials, labor and energy costs were impacting margins. The sales teams were negotiating long term customer contracts with outdated product costs causing surprises in the financial statements.

Our Response: Trenegy was hired to analyze and review the company’s product costing, reporting and forecasting processes. Much of their product costing was being managed manually in silos with various spreadsheets. Between the supply chain and the marketing teams, there was little collaboration and extensive manual handoffs. To solve this challenge, our team worked with the company to develop a consolidated process to automate the integration of supply and costing forecasts with the pricing process. As a part of this solution, our team implemented an enterprise forecasting system.

Result: The chemical company now has a unified forecasting process providing clear visibility into commodity price, labor and energy fluctuations impacts at a product, customer and market level. This allows the company to identify specific pricing issues and improve short term and long term margins.
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Streamlining for Efficiency

Client Situation: After several mergers and acquisitions, a global oil and gas services company determined that its fragmented processes were diminishing profitability even though revenues were increasing at a rapid rate. The Board challenged the organization to streamline processes and reduce administrative costs.

Our Response: We were hired by the COO to assess whether their customer support and administrative processes could be simplified, standardized and streamlined across the company. The Trenegy team traveled to a representative sample of the company’s field offices to survey the frontline operations to better understand how they were serving field operations. After evaluating the current state, we identified a series of leading practices that could be adopted and changes that could be easily implemented. These included, process standardization, consolidation of service lines, centralization of administrative functions and shifts in geographic accountability. These action items would allow the organization to standardize their customer facing processes, improve margins and reduce overhead costs.

Result: The organization was able to identify and realize significant year over year cost savings and meet the earnings targets set by the Executive Team. The improvements also allowed the company to have a more consistent approach with their customers and improve overall operating margins.
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The ERP Conundrum

Client Situation: A new CEO at one of our Oil and Gas clients arrived and asked for information the organization was unable to provide. The staff blamed the current ERP systems for their information woes. Following that, the IT organization developed a plan to migrate to SAP or Oracle with a price tag of around ten million dollars. The CEO wanted a better answer.

Our Response: We were hired by the CFO to take a look at their current systems and determine what could be done to improve information flow. We found that 80% of the information issues were a result of incomplete work and lack of process definition to capture the right information at the right time. The systems were not the problem, the use of the systems was the problem. Our team recommended a plan to improve processes and implement new reporting capabilities costing less than 10% of what new systems would have cost.

Result: The client implemented the recommendations and avoided a costly systems project cutting their costs significantly. We helped the client team build better process standards and better reports to capture information. In addition, the client was able to streamline certain business processes and reduce administrative costs from natural attrition.
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The Mining of Finance

Client Situation: New CFO of an oil field services company was concerned about the quality and understanding of financial information his finance organization was providing. He asked questions that could not be answered by finance or operations. He was expecting his finance organization to have the capability to understand the business and translate financial results for operations and management. A few organizational replacements were made; however, this did not solve the problem.

Our Response: We were hired by the CFO to review the capabilities of his finance organization and determine the best path forward. We found that most of finance and accounting’s time was spent gathering and mining for data instead of analyzing the results. Our team recommended a series of improvement initiatives geared toward educating finance and operations and improving overall information flow.

Result: We worked with the finance group to reorganize, developed a training program for operations and helped implement a planning process tied to the strategic plan. Following this, the CFO was able to uncover trends in their business and make strategic recommendations to improve margins and reduce costs throughout the organization.
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Earnings Projectile

Client Situation: A services company was barraging the board of directors and shareholders with surprises every earnings release. A rather significant earnings surprise was released as were a few personnel who knew of the issue ahead of time.

Our Response: We were hired by the CFO to determine how the organization could better forecast earnings. Our team helped the finance organization design and implement a rolling forecast process to proactively identify changes in financial results. Our team worked with their organization to train a new financial planning and analysis function and train operations on the new forecasting process.

Result: The CFO regained confidence with the board and the shareholders. This allowed the organization to eliminate surprise and build credibility in the stock market. The rise in the company’s stock price allowed them to invest in new geographies and grow the business with less second guessing from the board.
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Drilling for Change

Client Situation The CFO of a global oil & gas drilling company was spearheading a large scale ERP system implementation for the company. The company was about to rollout SAP’s HR, Finance and self-service modules. The CFO was well aware of similar implementations within the industry that had failed due to employee resistance. With such a complex implementation at hand, he was concerned that the organization would reject the new system and the project would be a failure, costing the company millions of lost dollars.

Our Response The CFO hired Trenegy to help the organization transition to the new ERP system as each module was released. Trenegy’s team conducted an in-depth assessment of the organization to identify how the changes would impact each function within the business. Based on this evaluation, they developed a comprehensive communication plan for management to use in guiding the organization through the impending changes. They also planned and coordinated employee training on the new systems by developing training materials, preparing trainers and providing support during the training process.

Result The communication plan provided a clear and consistent framework for the CFO to introduce the new ERP system to the organization without resistance from employees. The training plan allowed employees to ease into the new system without the frustration that is typical of most implementations. Overall, an effective execution of the communication and training plans led the company to a quick and simple system rollout, avoiding what would have been a challenging and painful process.

Producing Success

Client Situation A growing oil and gas production company was preparing to launch its operations in Asia and Africa. As a relatively new fast growing organization, they recognized the need to have the appropriate project management, financial, billing and procurement systems and processes in place to maintain discipline and control in the organization.

Our Response Trenegy was hired to develop a strategy and roadmap to support the company’s future growth plans. Trenegy’s team leveraged our deep experience with similar companies in the oil and gas industry to establish a starting point for the roadmap. The team worked with the organization’s leadership to integrate the company’s vision along with industry best practices into an overall plan and roadmap. Using this roadmap, Trenegy developed business processes and requirements for the new company management systems and an overall execution plan.

Result The organization was able to rollout a standardized set of business practices for the organization. The standardized project management, billing, supply chain and financial processes gave the organization credibility with its operating partners and customers while providing the controls needed to support their rapid growth.

The Seamless Transition

Client Situation A multinational industrial manufacturing company implemented a new SAP system in its European business units and had plans to expand the SAP footprint into the US operations. The CFO understood that system implementations such as this were notorious for delayed delivery and busted budgets. The company needed help navigating the unfamiliar US compliance requirements in order to rollout this system within budget and on time.

Our Response The CFO hired Trenegy to assist with the rollout of the SAP system in the US. Trenegy’s team evaluated the current processes and compared them to leading practices in the industry. Following this, the team worked closely with the finance, supply chain and sales organizations to understand the critical business requirements and help with implementation. Our team worked with the client’s internal SAP integration team to identify what changes needed to be made to the global SAP model to fit the US manufacturing subsidiary’s financial reporting requirements. The focus of the team was to create a fit for purpose instance of SAP.

Result The rollout of SAP to the US subsidiary was completed in a record three months. The CFO was able to eliminate the manual process of consolidating financial systems with the parent company and was able to eliminate manual purchasing, invoicing and payables processes associated with the legacy systems. Furthermore, manufacturing costing data was seamlessly integrated with the financial reports to produce more accurate product cost analysis to support pricing.

The Sales Secret

Client Situation A large industrial services company was growing quickly through acquisition but was losing market share. Profit margins were eroding and the number of new customers was dropping all while the competition was enjoying record growth. Senior management suspected that the sales organization wasn’t properly structure or operating efficiently. Prospects were complaining of multiple sales visits from different sales people trying to sell the same thing. Pricing structures were not consistent and the number of disputed invoices and DSO were sky rocketing. Senior Management decided that the sales force, organization and processes needed to be restructured to help the company avoid bankruptcy.

Our Response The company’s executives hired Trenegy to streamline and unify the sales organization. The project team began by evaluating the sales organization and processes. This assessment allowed the team to identify several quick wins and develop a long term roadmap to improve the organization. Trenegy’s short term changes established a standard contracting and pricing process across the organization. The long term plan would restructure the sales organization so that the staff would operate as account teams, rather than in silos. The teams would assign specific roles and responsibilities to team members and include employees from other parts of the organization including Finance, Legal and Operations. This would improve collaboration between groups and eliminate many of the inconsistencies that were driven by poor communication.

Result The reorganization of the sales group created a more consistent approach towards contracts, pricing, and customer service. The team environment improved communications, eliminating much of the confusion and frustration that plagued employees. Through a unified sales force and stronger communication, the company avoided bankruptcy, stopped losing market share, and ultimately increased profit margins.

The Reporting Formula

Client Situation: A global chemical company went through rapid growth of its core business and disposition of non-core assets. Through these periods of change, the organization’s financial reporting requirements changed. The amount of time and effort required to report financials grew rapidly and management was frustrated with the excessive amount of data and lack of information they were receiving. Consequently, many of the business units created their own sets of reports which created multiple versions of the truth.

Our Response: Management hired Trenegy to develop a Reporting Strategy to prioritize metrics and rationalize their financial reports. The project team began by evaluating the current reporting environment, metrics and prioritizing management’s reporting requirements. The Trenegy team rationalized their reporting needs and developed an overall design and data model. The final data model allowed the organization to develop a standardized set of financial reports to meet company and business unit needs.

Result: The chemical company was able to quickly integrate the new data model into their current financial reporting tools and processes. The new environment allowed the organization to automate the financial reporting process and provide management with a quicker view into the financial results. Furthermore, they were able to eliminate the mounds of spreadsheets the organization was creating, allowing the finance staff to focus on more valuable tasks.
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