Interim Project Manager - Treasury, Cleantech Company

The Client

The company, which has been a leader in the technology sector - renewable energies - for decades, plans, builds and operates its plants in Germany and at international locations (Europe, North and South America).

The company distinguishes itself among other factors by:

• New development of reliable, technological innovations
• Low maintenance requirements of the plants
• High quality in production, logistics, service (availability rate of the plants > 95%)
• Certified systems for energy saving

The Challenge

In order to limit the considerable fluctuations in foreign exchange trading, the current, worldwide exchange rate management system first had to be analyzed in detail in order to derive and define targeted optimization measures for the company.

Special consideration had to be given to the country-specific deviations (Asia, North America, Europe) of the hedging variables in order to finally identify possibilities for hedging exchange rate fluctuations in consultation with the management and to establish measures in this regard.

The interim manager's consulting skills for the management as well as the ability to train the relevant employees for the new measures played a decisive role in the rapid success of this assignment.

The Solution

An experienced interim manager from the treasury field, familiar with corresponding projects, with the necessary consistency in the execution of the project and with a fine market sense for the necessary decisions, who "turned the right screws in the right place at the right time", was able to significantly change the required transformation in this sensitive area of the company.

The Result

• Carrying out an extensive data analysis coupled with conducting numerous interviews in the key Sales and Procurement departments quickly provided a realistic picture of the situation and revealed the unaddressed weaknesses.
• As a result, it was possible to successfully identify the compound risk and immediately implement countermeasures in a timely manner: the timing for the effective hedging measures was helpful in this context. Likewise, the given peculiarities of correlations in currency pairs were taken into account.
• The number of hedging measures and the hedging volume could be kept small.
• The IFRS-compliant implementation of these components was established as a standard.
• A tool previously acquired by the company, which had been little used and exhausted for evaluations, could be turned into a meaningful reporting tool.
• The interim manager was able to qualify and enable employees for the new tools through specific training.