Cutting the Close Cycle for a Petrochemical Manufacturer

The challenge

Three plant expansions and an acquisition had left the manufacturer's finance function running on fragmented ERP configurations, with consolidation done manually in spreadsheets across plants each month. Close routinely took more than 15 working days, and the group parent — preparing for a planned bond issuance — had tightened its reporting deadlines and asked pointed questions about the manufacturer's internal financial controls.

A pre-issuance internal audit had flagged gaps in segregation of duties and reconciliation discipline at plant level. None of this was hidden or deliberate; it was the natural residue of growth that had outpaced the finance function's processes.

What we did

• Process-mapped the close cycle end-to-end across three plants and the corporate centre, identifying manual handoffs and reconciliation bottlenecks
• Standardised the chart of accounts and consolidation logic across the plant-level ERPs, removing the need for manual spreadsheet consolidation
• Redesigned the close calendar around parallel workstreams and hard cut-off points, replacing the previous sequential plant-by-plant approach
• Implemented a control framework covering journal approval, account reconciliation and segregation of duties, mapped directly against the group's internal audit findings
• Trained plant-level finance teams on the new close routine and ran two live close cycles alongside them before handover