Publishing and Media Conglomerate

Our Approach

The Q5 team completed a four-month project, deep-diving into cost and FTE from both the Publishing and Audio sides of the business:

• Cost model – Worked with department CFOs to understand the existing data reporting processes – P&L, Functions, and FTE. Developed a structured cost model with to deliver a department, country, and brand level perspective of the provided data, a view that had previously never be available to senior management
• Data collection – Devised input templates for each country to complete which mirrored the model structure, ensuring comparability between geographies and alignment to existing data reporting processes. The team conducted a vast data collection and quality assurance exercise via an iterative validation process with additional country CFO engagement to remove inconsistencies in data provision.
• Data processing – Utilised ‘Knime’ data wrangling software to organise and manipulate provided data into a model structure. The Knime workflow enabled agreed allocation methodologies to be applied to the data, presenting the most representative view of brand level Revenue, OpEx, CapEx, EBIT and FTE
• Activity Analysis – using Q5’s priority digital tooling, ActivityQ, conducted an enterprise wide (c. 4000 FTE) Activity Analysis providing granular detail into what activity was taking place and at what effort
• Insights generation – Interrogated the validated data through Excel and a detailed PowerBI dashboard to highlight anomalies and trends across geographies. By testing initial findings against external benchmarks and other countries, the team delivered a list of evidenced and financially quantified cost saving opportunities for the client to further explore