Helen Shan has gone from crisis to transformation since joiningPitney Bowes in 2005. She was pivotal in guiding the maker ofpostage meters and other mail management products through themarket meltdown of 2008. And now Shan is playing a key role in afinance transformation that will leave the company leaner, meanerand in fighting form for the future.

As a former investment banker and analyst with Salomon Brothersand JP Morgan, Shan is uniquely qualified to head the financialre-engineering effort that Pitney Bowes is undertaking as part of alarger strategic transformation.

Shan, who serves as thecompany's treasurer, vice president of finance and head ofcorporate development, was intimately involved in thedecision-making around the transformation and has managed theentire process in addition to her other responsibilities.

“It has been a fast year,” she says.

The finance restructuring has three goals: to centralize thosefinancial operations that until now were managed at thebusiness-unit level; to better align support for business units andsplit responsibilities between support and core functions; and todevelop centers of excellence from a process and controlperspective as well as allowing finance team specialization.

The project involved an organizational redesign to leverageknowledge and standardize and centralize processes; the focusingand development of existing Americas shared services centers intoglobal operations—with additional regional shared services centers;and improvements in planning and performance management.

“My role was to lead the organizational redesign and oversee theother two projects [involving shared services centers and planningand performance management], each with its own lead,” Shansays.

Pitney Bowes, with $5.4 billion in 2010 revenue, is reducing itsfinance head count by about 10% and dramatically changing the mixof internal vs. outsourced finance work.

“Before we had about 5% of operations outsourced. Once this isdone, it will be more like 60/40,” Shan says. “We want highervalue-added processes to be handled by PB and more of theday-to-day execution transactions to be third party.”

The organizational redesign was mostly finished in the first sixmonths, she says, while the other two projects are ongoing.

Although the company did not have any major exposure to theinvestments that took the worst hits during the financial crisis in2008, it did face the same market conditions as everyone else andhad a few exposures to work through. With responsibility forcapital-raising, Shan was central in helping the company manageduring the crisis.

“Certainly the events of 2008 changed how the company focused onliquidity,” she says. Shan's biggest challenge was managing PitneyBowes' auction-rate preferred stock, which the company refinancedas straight preferred.

Shan joined Stamford, Conn.-based Pitney Bowes as corporatetreasurer, with responsibility for treasury operations, insuranceand pensions. More than a year ago, her role was expanded toinclude corporate development and investor relations.

See the complete coverage of Treasury & Risk's2011 Women in Finance list here.