Then there are people. "We have a great group of hard-working professionals who work well as a team," Henry explains. That team is somewhat unusual, heavy on financial planning and analysis–FP&A–pros, he notes. Rather than bring together specialized treasury operations experts, he wanted people who would "work on the front line with our business operations people and really feel the pulse of the business." Besides Henry and Lee, the eight-person treasury staff includes three managers and three analysts. One manager and two analysts work from a U.K. treasury center, the rest at corporate headquarters.

Finally, structure plays a critical role. "This is one global company where tax and treasury are completely integrated and where management is redoing the whole tax structure and the whole banking structure to fit the new organization," Jeffery says.

Infor Global Solutions was hatched in 1992, when savvy computer software executive Jim Schaper and far-sighted private equity company Golden Gate Capital teamed up, acquired more than 30 companies in short order and folded them together into Infor. Add two distressed software companies that Golden Gate Capital bought in 2002 for $30 million, then a merger of four giants in 2006–Infor (where Henry worked); SSA Global; Canada's Geac Computer Corp. (where Lee worked); and the U.K.'s Systems Union–and "the 10th largest software company in the world," says Henry, was formed.

The structural overhaul has reduced Infor from 380 legal entities to 200, Henry reports. Accounting ledgers have shrunk from 50 to two and will eventually go to just one. "As we drive down legal entities, working capital improves and complexities decrease," he points out. "It's all about sequencing and doing things in the proper order."

Required working capital has been reduced so far by 28%, with a goal to lop off another 10% by February 2009, Henry says. The key, he explains, is first rationalizing the legal entity structure and then consolidating bank accounts. Repatriating funds from foreign operations is facilitated naturally by charging intellectual property fees to foreign distributors, he notes.

Infor has spent the last year and a half rebuilding departments from the ground up, including treasury, Lee reports. "We looked at the shareholders' and the CFO's objectives for finance and then created a set of treasury objectives that would complement them," she says. "When you have major debt leverage, then tight working capital management, based on good cash forecasting, is always particularly important."

So far, Infor has inventoried all accounts and whittled the number down from 684 to 490, with a goal of reaching 350 by the middle of next year. Infor has selected primary banking partners in each region. Where possible, Infor businesses will use Wachovia in the U.S., Scotiabank in Canada, ABN Amro in Europe and HSBC in Asia and Latin America, she says. The goal is to reduce the number of banking relationships from 80 to fewer than 30.

Rationalizing bank accounts has been a huge task, Lee says. Weiland provided a useful data base repository for all company accounts. "That gave us a platform to see what we have, understand the activity and then work with our six shared service centers to consolidate A/P, A/R, lockboxes and payroll accounts and to begin moving accounts we needed to keep from legacy banks to our preferred banks," she explains.

Cash forecasting was hampered at first by a lack of reliable historical data for what was essentially a new corporation, but starting in July 2006, Infor began to build a database of historical cash inflows and outflows through Cognos. Now Infor has a good year-and-a-half of historical data, which is used to help formulate reliable cash forecasts.

As cash forecasting improves and the legal entity structure and the pooling of cash are further simplified, Infor will be able to trim the cash cushions it leaves in regional accounts. "As we get comfortable repatriating more cash to corporate monthly, it reduces our investment in working capital," Lee observes. "We've made good progress in the past year."

When fully implemented, the Integrity workstation will automate daily cash management. "We have about 95% of our U.S. bank accounts and 80% of our European accounts reporting through Integrity," Lee explains. "When we complete that project, we can quickly see our cash position without visiting multiple bank portals. As an extension of the treasury workstation, we are also in the process of implementing a money market and FX trading portal and integrating these with Infor's proprietary software infrastructure," she adds.

While rebuilding a streamlined financial infrastructure was dictated by immediate needs, it also prepares the company not just for efficient operations but for possible strategic moves. "We want to be sure we have all the internal controls in place that investors would expect of a public company and private company to keep our options open," Lee says.