Outcomes
Within a ten-week engagement, Curzon delivered a complete end-to-end plan for costing data remediation, a clearly defined optimised target state, and a set of immediately actionable IT recommendations to establish a robust, controlled costing process. Critically, the project also surfaced and addressed a significant margin risk — identifying where sales giveaways were eroding profitability due to flawed cost calculations — and designed a solution to protect against it going forward.
Background
The business’s entire costing process had come to rest on a foundation of Excel — manual, uncontrolled, and opaque. There were no system-level safeguards, no transparency across the end-to-end process, and no single person or team with a complete picture of how costs were actually calculated. Knowledge was deeply siloed: individuals understood their own piece of the process well, but had little visibility of how it connected to the whole.
The consequences were significant. Errors and inconsistencies in the costing process were translating directly into margin erosion, with sales teams inadvertently giving away value that the business couldn’t see or quantify. The risks were real, but because the process had never been mapped end-to-end, they had never been properly understood.
Curzon Approach
Curzon moved quickly — mapping the current-state process in full within the first two weeks of a ten-week engagement. To do this effectively in an environment of siloed expertise, we deliberately sequenced our stakeholder engagement: speaking to individuals first, then bringing people together in groups, and finally convening a cross-functional workshop to ensure knowledge was surfaced, shared, and validated across the business rather than remaining locked in separate pockets.
With the as-is process fully documented, we developed a recommended target state — building on planned IT investment already in the pipeline to design an optimised, automated process that would remove the manual fragility at the heart of the current approach. We then worked up a detailed data cleanup plan, scoping the effort required to bring the underlying cost data up to the standard the new process would require.
Throughout, we kept the focus on what mattered most — in a project where unforeseen complexity surfaced regularly, disciplined triage ensured that effort was directed at the risks with the greatest commercial impact. Real product examples were used to make the problems tangible and communicable to stakeholders at every level, building the shared understanding needed to drive genuine buy-in to the recommendations.
