Following the acquisition of Shire Pharmaceuticals in 2019, Takeda, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, started its journey toward becoming a best-in-class finance organization.
Takeda's global CFO, Costa Saroukos, acknowledged that in order to achieve its vision, the finance organization had to evolve. Working collaboratively with EY teams through a three-year engagement, Takeda’s financial close process underwent an end-to-end transformation to deliver an accelerated process while improving user experience.
“Project Quantum” was initiated to bring this vision to life and to advance the closing process to best-in-class.
“When we launched Project Quantum in early 2020, it was clear that we had a long road ahead of us to reach our best-in-class aspirations in financial close processes. But I was confident that with our great people in Finance at Takeda and the right application, we could achieve this goal,” Saroukos said.
The project scope was expanded to include performance targets, with key metrics established that were strongly endorsed by Takeda’s senior leadership. These metrics went hand-in-hand with an effective monitoring and governance workstream tracking each of Takeda legal entity’s performance against these targets.
To deliver such a transformational impact, the project team was led by the record-to-disclose (R2D) global process owner and structured into four workstreams:
- Base-to-close (local closing procedures, up to submission to the corporate team)
- Calendar and governance
- Finance systems, consolidation and governance
- External reporting
Barbara Lenzlinger, Project Quantum Lead & Global Process Owner (R2D) at Takeda, said: “Our goal since the beginning of Project Quantum has been to accelerate the financial close by working smarter, not harder.”