Led by finance: Val Zha Yinqun ACMA, CGMA is finance operation director at WuXi AppTec, a pharma, biotech and medical device outsourcing company. he explains how his team has transformed in order to support the firm's management and business units more effectively.

THE BACKGROUND The company, which has operations in China and the US, had been extending its services and upgrading its R&D capabilities consistently over the preceding years. As a result, the business had grown strongly by 2012 - and my finance team needed to change radically in order to provide the heightened level of support it required.

THE PLAN First we needed to adopt the objective of becoming "business partners" to the management team and business units by giving them more strategic and value-added financial advice for effective decision-making. To achieve this transformation, we would need to complete a series of projects. In order to manage all of these, we decided to apply the lean Six Sigma approach.

THE PROCESS The "mega finance transformation project", led by our group CFO, started in 042012. We chose a project manager from the finance department, who would be supported by the lean Six Sigma team. Project sponsors, who were mainly senior managers, would provide high-level guidance and resource support. All of its subprojects had clear targets - eg, to reduce overdue receivables by a certain amount. In pursuit of this goal, we established a contract review mechanism; created a customer credit rating system; introduced key performance indicators to make business units more accountable; and streamlined the collection process. The indicators we devised at the outset were reviewed during the project and again after implementation. We used external consultants on some sub-projects where we required specific knowledge that we didn't possess in house.

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