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Alexander Hamilton Awards

Retooling Processes to Improve Productivity and ROI

Stanley Black & Decker’s global treasury modernization initiative won the 2019 Bronze Alexander Hamilton Award in Technology Excellence.

When the management team at Stanley Black & Decker rolled out their strategic goal of growing the global business from US$13 billion to $22 billion in annual revenues by 2022, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) became a key pillar of the corporate strategy. The increased M&A activity has been successful in growing the business, but it has come with a side effect: an increasingly diverse technology and banking infrastructure.

“A few years ago, we had over 100 ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems and more than 2,000 bank accounts with approximately 200 different banks,” explains Catherine Grant-Alston, director of global cash operations for Stanley Black & Decker. And the treasury team’s processes for managing liquidity across this web of accounts and accounting systems was inefficient, at best.

For example, the company’s treasury management system captured liquidity information only for U.S.-based business units. “We were a global company that could only see our U.S. liquidity profile, which was a small portion of the overall company’s portfolio,” Grant-Alston says. “Our general ledger [G/L] entries were manual. We would work with our finance teams around the globe to get ledger balances at month-end, but the other 29 days of the month were piecemeal. We would send emails to newly acquired entities that were not yet integrated, asking, ‘What was your bank account balance as of Friday? And what does your forecast look like for the next two weeks?’ It was the perfect storm of a global company using antiquated processes.”

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Meg Waters

Meg Waters

Meg Waters is the editor in chief of Treasury & Risk. She is the former editor in chief of BPM Magazine and the former managing editor of Business Finance.

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