Over the next 12 months, what are your priorities as a finance leader?
Didier: As you understood, growth is a priority for Bel Brands, so here I’m really working with my team to best determine how the finance can contribute to fuel the growth and really help our growth drivers, who are sales and marketing folks, to really accelerate in how the finance team can help them to really fast-track into the growth.
As I told you, we’re in the process of doing a strategy plan. Here, we really want to push, in that perspective, to where do we want to go, how we can get there, how fast, and basically what it will require from an organizational standpoint. This the key priority for us, to craft the strategy plan against what I said, not only the financial aspect of it, but crafting the key priorities in how we get there. That is a very important one for me.
We have, also, a number of IT projects going on. One of the key ones is really about bringing automation. Now that we have really stabilized SAP, we’re building a lot of different modules all around SAP in order to support, again, the sales team. For example, we’re implementing a new trade form [SP] management tool at the end of this year. I’m working to put in place some Business Intelligence, BI, reporting, so here it’s really how to automate some very user-friendly dashboards in order for our different teams to see their KPIs in a nutshell, however often they want to look at it. And implementing, also, an electronic archiving process. We want to get paperless, so that’s something that we’re doing at that point.
You can see that there are a lot of things going on. And, also, as we keep growing, we’re looking, also, at our industrial capabilities to see, in terms of capacity, what we need for the next 10 years for the company.