NATIONAL FORTUNE 500 RETAILER GAINS VISIBILITY ON INCENTIVES ACROSS THE ORGANIZATION

SITUATION:
The Audit Committee Chairman for a national Fortune 500 retailer initiated an internal audit on their business incentives to gauge the scope and performance companywide. With over 800 locations and 170,000 employees nationwide, this was no small task – his goal was to frame a clear picture of the value of their past, current and future business incentives. The Chairman reached out to the CEO & CFO looking for their help to shed light on the issue and to understand why this information wasn’t shared with the Board or the Audit Committee. The CFO was tasked with charting and valuing all discretionary & statutory incentives – and creating internal control procedures for managing & tracking them going forward. 

RESULTS:
After populating their incentives into the BIGcontrols platform, the CFO was able to quickly run reports and identify a number of issues that warranted further attention. He also uncovered several opportunities where they could further maximize value and utilization. Specifically, the company was doing a great job with HR-related statutory incentives in the Southeast, but performing poorly with similar incentives in the West. The CFO reached out to the VP of HR who was tasked with identifying the underlying issues in order to solve the problem. The company also discovered that their distribution facilities in the East had a considerably higher level of incentives associated with them. As a result, the CFO tracked down the consulting firm engaged for the higher performing East region and secured them for all future projects—in all regions—going forward.

Beyond the obvious, the leadership gained valuable insight into the company’s incentive performance across business units by incentive categories, which led to specific actions to increase incentive value by 65% – and ultimately drove improvements across the organization. The end result was increased shareholder value and newly-created transparency for the Audit Committee.