Lifestyle hospitality company

Challenges

A privately held, premier lifestyle hospitality company drove significant growth through acquisition. During this period of growth, the focus was on topline revenue with minimal focus on back office integration and consolidated reporting. As the organization continued to grow through acquisition, it found it difficult to meet its period end close financial reporting deadlines. Our team was brought in to review the client’s entire financial operations processing and technology environments to develop recommendations to drive efficiencies, leverage technologies, and enhance controls. We were also involved in identifying areas of improvement for integrating financial and operational data with both the property management and holding companies.

Solutions

Achieving the client’s time sensitive objectives required the following actions:

• Interviewing key stakeholders from across the organization to include: executive staff members, finance / accounting leadership and staff, property management resources, information technology leadership and analysts, and key stakeholders from the holding company.
• Developing detailed process maps depicting current processes and points of failure.
• Developing detailed financial operations processes, reporting, technology and controls recommendations that generated a detailed roadmap for implementation.
• Interviewing 3rd party service providers to assess their end to end capabilities to identify areas of process improvements / controls.
• Developing heat maps depicting specific potential points of failure to support the investment of the organization’s scarce resources.
• Developing a full set of High, Medium and Low priority recommendations.
• Developing a roadmap / timeline for the implementation of recommendations into short-term (0 – 90 days), medium-term (91 – 180 days) and long-term (181+ days).
• Developing a detailed series of presentations tailored to the key stakeholders’ area of impact.
• Developing an overall assessment of the organization’s financial operations based upon industry best practices.

Results

Mazars Consulting led an efficient and thorough process optimization initiative in an aggressive timeline to meet the new reporting timeline established by the organization’s parent company. We delivered a full set of “To Be” business processes
as well as an application environment topology that captured their back-office processes, (e.g., accounting, financial reporting, property management and application integration) that had never been done before. The client was provided a detailed roadmap focused on action steps to deliver an efficient, control oriented and cost-effective future state processing
environment that positioned the organization to achieve its aggressive period end close / reporting goals.

Based on our collaborative work style and ability to understand the client’s business, our team completed this initiative on-time and within budget. Our client expressed satisfaction with the work product and immediately began moving forward with the high impact recommendations.

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