Case Studies

Laing O’Rourke wanted to assess the business case for a new manufacturing facility for modular construction, supplying c10,000 housing units per year.  Offsite and modular construction techniques have the potential to provide a step change in productivity and build quality and the associated reduction in true costs.

Kensa Consulting was engaged to develop the investment appraisal financial model. After an initial audit of the existing model and discussions with senior management, it was decided that a new 15-year financial model was the best approach. This was to provide additional functionality as well as improve design, increase calculation transparency and provide clearer logic flow through the model.

Kensa Consulting liaised with the Project Director and Head of FP&A to develop a model with multiple scenarios and sensitivities to analyse the change impact in underlying assumptions. This allowed for the delivery of a robust financial model to enable a clear and detailed appraisal of the £150m investment.

Based on the success of this project, Kensa Consulting were invited back to Laing O’Rourke to develop data analytics tools and further financial models, including a scenario-based business planning model that encompassed their European region’s activity.

This was a more complex model, consisting of a monthly rolling reforecast that extracted actuals on several hundred projects from a data warehouse, and spliced this with a driver-based forecast.

• Modelled various business units & interdependencies
• Worked with key stakeholders to facilitate accuracy & buy-in
• Model included debt re-fi; sector analysis; automation macros; 350 integrity checks; scenarios (margin / win rate / timing etc.)

The result was a detailed financial model to help develop strategy to grow their £3bn turnover.

Adrian is very pleased to have worked with Heineken on a series of engagements building Excel-based management information tools. Some examples:

• Global Sales Capability tool to track and analyse all types of sales activities then ‘slice and dice’ the data to display graphical outputs across various metrics, in a simple user-friendly format.
• Key Account Management tool to forecast profitability and increase awareness of pricing after multiple promotional and trade discounts. European-wide rollout.
• Market Landscape tool to analyse market performance, company and competitor profitability, generating a portfolio of bespoke graphical outputs. European-wide rollout.

Applications for other tools included: optimising sales channel strategies; project tracking; 360 degree reporting of Line Manager effectiveness; self-assessment questionnaires and scorecards; global sales academy dashboard.

Adrian’s initial engagement with Veldhoven was to construct a financial model. However, based on the success of this first project, he was asked back again (and again!) to build management information tools focusing on Sales and internal reporting.

The financial model was built to evaluate scenarios for a UK-wide franchise of retail shops to sell one of Veldhoven’s fashion brands. The model provided detailed outputs for a potential shop location then used a VBA macro to assess the profitability of any chosen portfolio. The model enabled Veldhoven to investigate a range of factors in order to determine their most profitable strategy.

In another project for Veldhoven, Adrian built a management information tool to complement a new Sales strategy. The tool allowed the setting of targets for Sales Account Managers, then the tracking of their performance and displayed a dashboard of their sales activity.

The dashboard gave an ‘at-a-glance’ picture of how they were doing, where they were on track and where they needed to focus effort. The second stage used a button-click macro to consolidate all Sales Account Manager files into a single reporting tool, giving a powerful up-to-date dashboard which could be filtered to show data by geographical area, brand, Sales Managers and Sales Account Managers. The tool was rolled out for use across the UK, Benelux, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.