Freeing up £500m+ in cost savings for investment in new growth and future value at a global FMCG business

How can you improve margin, boost operational resilience and accelerate innovation across a global business?

Under mounting pressure from competitors and investors, this global FMCG business needed to move fast to improve its  productivity, resilience and key operational capabilities.

The priority? Free up funds for investment in these critical areas by achieving savings across its cost base.

Steadily increasing costs had been impeding growth and damaging the company’s ability to remain resilient to market pressures.

The company identified four areas where spiralling costs were a key concern: direct and indirect third-party expenditure, manufacturing, process efficiencies, and marketing expenditure.

An ambitious and mission-critical transformation journey

Needing support to set up and run transformation initiatives across all four cost bases, the company asked Baringa to help.

We committed to supporting the client for the long term. The reason why? We know that short-term approaches to cost and margin often result in more pain for the organisation further down the road.

Our experts immediately went to work across the programme, collaborating closely with workstream leadership, programmatic change, and SME delivery roles. 

As a truly enterprise-wide programme for a major global business, this demanded big-picture vision combined with a granular control of detail.

First of all, we scrutinised the financial assumptions that had been made to ensure the size of the prize was correct.

Next, having set a realistic baseline for change, we developed an approach that combined a number of innovative solutions – from setting up a centralised tear-down lab to analyse margin opportunities in packaging, through to best-practice category management playbooks.

Whether we were dealing with local, regional or global brands, we applied the same rigorous approach. And to ensure that our client could truly ‘save to transform’, all of this was underpinned by forensic management of benefits realisation.

Above-target savings to reinvest in innovation and growth

Throughout the multi-year journey, we helped our client find over £500m of savings across all addressable cost bases. These savings were allocated to innovate and grow capabilities that are now fuelling strong performance for the company’s brands worldwide.

Find out how we help our clients in Enterprise Value Creation