Helping you make better investment decisions and improve performance through data
We drive value creation by combining our deep deals, operational and strategic expertise with the latest cutting edge technologies to realise better business outcomes.
Take a closer look at how we deliver insights using advanced analytics and technologies across the entire deal lifecycle.
Today's fast-changing business and technology landscapes present unparalleled opportunities for faster and more transformative growth.
Deal Analytics can help you harness that potential - but doing so requires deep deal fluency to uncover the insights behind the information.
We can work with you at any point in your journey to turn complex data into business intelligence. We can deliver the right advice, at the right time, to make the right decision.
Deal Execution - Buy Side
Evaluate the commercial attractiveness of a target business, quantifying and validating full upside value potential using data-driven innovation.
Case studies
- Understanding product margin variations at SKU level
- Investigating campuses performance and student’s behaviour
- Real estate data platform
Understanding product margin variations at SKU level
Explore and explain product margin differences and business plan assumptions to discover valuable insights and support the negotiations.
Margin identified at SKU level
The target was a pharmaceutical start-up who had seen rapid growth but decreasing margin over the last three years. In order to restore profitability, management had drafted a Business Plan whose assumptions the client wanted to clarify on a product by product basis.
The challenge
The target rapid expansion along with changing reporting systems and policies meant that the information available was sparse and inconsistent across the years.
In addition, it was necessary to understand the business plan growth assumptions and the historical trend at the most granular level accessible.
The outcome
With three years of historical data and the budget under constant revision, we used ETL and visualization tools to develop a unique data source which allowed us to test the target assumptions and create dynamic visualizations to gain quick insights.
The depth and breadth of the research were crucial for the client to conduct an informed negotiation, better understand the past performance, the equity story and possible roadblock ahead.
Investigating campuses performance and student’s behaviour
Create a common data source at deal speed to investigate the campus performance, cluster the student base and analyze the cash collection.
Company data queried in real time
We were asked to cluster more than 40k students and hundredth of university centers to gain valuable insights that had been used throughout the due diligence.
The challenge
Having a broad student base and longstanding operations in multiple regions the client needed to have a unified view of the students composition and cash collection, as well as the university centers’ performance and maturity.
Being provided with 7+ years of data, the combined dataset amounted to millions of records which required the use of analytics tools to transform the data, blend it and create an automated clustering algorithm to cluster the students.
The outcome
With an integrated approach that bridged tech experts, financial analysts and deal professionals we created a complete dataset to explore the existing relationship between students and university centers.
Unforeseen insights have been discovered and made readily available in a robust and repeatable manner; this allowed the client to understand the student participation in the different university centers and identify those that were attracting more students.
Real estate data platform
Create a common data platform that is leveraged throughout the deal and combines commercial, deals and analytics expertise in order to surface valuable insights and reinforce the equity story.
€13 bln sales value achieved
Our real estate client was in the process of a high-profile sale and needed a coherent and robust view of their business to articulate the equity story.
After executing a strategy of rapid acquisitive growth in a short period of time, they entered the transaction with a complex data landscape and required our help to make sense of the business.
The challenge
Having acquired many hundreds of assets over the past few years, it was essential for our client to demonstrate performance improvements made while under their ownership across key commercial metrics and asset segments on a like-for-like basis.
In order to achieve the required level of data quality and integrity we had to overcome the challenge of harmonising the decentralised finance processes, accounting variations and disparate data sources across different sub-portfolios and markets.
We wanted to bring greater transparency over key metrics, such as lease-up activity, rent rates, occupancy, and exposure to risk through contractual break and expiry clauses - all of which were essential in demonstrating the equity story
The outcome
By using advanced analytics platforms we quickly consolidated and aligned the client’s disparate accounting and rent data, creating a dynamic tool with drill-down capability ready for deep analyses. Our client was able to explore high-level group trends and underlying drivers at the asset level, adding layers of visibility for internal management, their advisors and bidders.
This served as a single source of truth for the transaction - from the information memorandum stage through to buy-side due diligence. Using this solution, we were able to successfully support both the bidders and the vendor during the deal process, providing insightful analysis and commercial advice about the business and industry.
Deal Execution - Sell Side
Apply data analytics to bring a richer understanding of the business value and drive better results on deal objectives.
Case studies
- Multi-site analytics
- Website traffic and historical trading results
Multi-site analytics
Analytics were used to aggregate store level information and evaluate the overall performance on a weekly basis.
Interactive deal tool available at deal speed
The client, a restaurant chain in the midst of a due diligence process, had provided us with account-level data of multiple stores scattered across Italy, we have been able to blend the data and maintain the POS level information granularity.
The challenge
The profitability data of 200+ stores with inconsistent data structures needed to be harmonized and analyzed. The information was constantly updated, for this reason we needed a fast and reliable way to perform the transformation as well as the analyses. Additionally, the client wanted to cluster and drill down for different business dimensions such as location and product.
The outcome
The data flow created allowed us to merge the information, update it and query the consolidated P&L whenever needed. Having preserved the store level data we have been able to analyze both the financials and business data in a seamless, integrated manner. Thanks to a stable and consistent source of information it was possible to identify specific insights to improve the POS efficiency.
Website traffic and historical trading results
Big data analytics on website traffic and users demographics in order to assess conversion, retention and bounce rate as well as analysis of revenues and margin trends.
Financial and business dashboards available to all the Deal actors in 3 weeks
In the course of a financial due diligence we assisted our client in the selling process of an a-commerce leader in the food and beverage industry. The client needed to gather deep insights on the target company in order to understand the website performance as well as the drivers of the revenues and margins growth in the recent years.
The challenge
We were provided with several large data sets for each year to clean and analyse in a short period of time. Therefore, one of the challenges of the project involved efficient data transformation and integration techniques in order to create a unique data source for our analysis.
The outcome
After cleaning and merging the information, we carried out detailed analysis and provided our client with a clear and accurate understanding of the company’s figures and trends. Finally, our client had access to our selection of tableau dashboards with the possibility of playing with the data as they preferred.
Financial & Business reporting
Realisation of interactive consolidated financial statements and business dashboards for end-month reviews, perfomance monitoring and insights discovery.
Case studies
- Post deal performance transparency
- Post deal CFO Reporting
Post deal performance transparency
Leverage the latest technology with deep industry expertise to deliver innovative end to end solutions and make faster, smarter, fact-based decisions.
5 days reduction in month end cycle
Our client was a leading international paper manufacturing company that had been acquired by a leading Private Equity house. With new owners in place, there was a drive to improve performance transparency and identify value creation opportunities across the business.
The challenge
Our client had asked us to resolve their current performance transparency challenges. They had ambitious plans, but they were layered with complexities.
They wanted to reduce their slow month-end reporting cycle and resolve inconsistencies in cost allocation methods and inaccuracies in product profitability in order to get to actionable insights quickly. A platform within a robust governance framework was needed, with the right tools and capabilities embedded into the business.
The outcome
Using the latest cloud technology with an agile approach, we efficiently processed millions of transactional lines to develop a scalable, cloud-based platform for processing and reporting performance
This platform helped the company manage their business performance by region, product and customer, and reduce the month end reporting timeframe by 5 days. We were able to provide the client with full visibility over the entire business and fully allocate costs to products. Specific product and customer profitability trends could be identified, allowing strategic decision making based on the overall company performance and ultimately the achievement of their growth ambitions.
Post deal CFO Reporting
Accounting and analytics expertise to gather, harmonize and display granular data coming from multiple points of sales.
Financial monthly closing and weekly managerial reports available in 4 weeks
The client was a pharmacy chain operator that grew via a sustained acquisition campaign (from 0 to .ca 170 pharmacies in 2.5 years)
The challenge
The accounting and profitability data of 150+ pharmacies with inconsistent reporting processes and dictionaries needed to be harmonized and analyzed. The financial information were gathered by the single pharmacies’ accountants. Business data were available in similar formats but not used due to their volume. The client wanted to create a unique monthly financial report and use the profitability data to make informed decisions about the business.
The outcome
In the first phase a clear understanding of the client different processes was fundamental to recognize where improvements could be made and which BI tool to use. We then focused on structuring the process itself, designing it in the most efficient and automated way. Financial and business dashboards were available in 10 weeks. The tool is usable by client analysts who can customize it or simply download what needed.
Preparation for Sale
Articulate a compelling and robust investment story, leveraging the latest analytics technology to understand full value creation potential.
Case studies
- Whitespace analysis for revenues enhancement
- Sentiment analysis for revenues enhancement
Whitespace analysis for revenues enhancement
Identification of expansion opportunities with geospatial analytics. Development of a data driven approach for the rollout of new stores.
80 new potential sites identified
In the course of a point of sales expansion we developed a statistical model to understand which spots were best suited to house new stores. We based our work on a vast array of quantitative and qualitative information to keep into account internal accounting data, publicly available data and competitors information to identify the most suitable spots.
The challenge
With 100+ existing retail points the identification of new locations was getting increasingly complex considering the competition and the volume of internal information required for the analysis. Furthermore it was necessary to gather external data meaning that we were challenged by the identification of meaningful samples.
The outcome
We decided to approach the client problem with an analytical and business savvy approach. We analyzed the best performers among the existing stores to understand their features, which had then been used to identify the most relevant locations using a statistical model. The model outcomes had then been filtered using business judgement allowing us to identify the location that would most likely turn out to be profitable.
Sentiment analysis for revenues enhancement
Collect and analyse customers’ reviews and locations to assess the brand perception of the target and compare it with the competitors.
Clear understanding of the customer voice and opinion regarding services and products
In the course of a commercial due diligence we gathered the target reviews on specific platforms. We then replicated the work for several competitors and identified our client topics of interest (e.g. personnel politeness, product quality etc.) The topics’ language was analyzed to understand the customers’ sentiment regarding the topics, resulting in the discovery of significant insights.
The challenge
The client wanted to understand its brand and products perception in different geographic area compared to its competitors.
Starting from public data we gathered .ca 20k reviews which have then been processed and analyzed using state of the art statistical models (e.g. Neural Networks, BERT algorithms and k-Means).
The outcome
We delivered a collection of dashboards where we combine geospatial analysis and text mining results. Thanks to machine learning algorithms we are able to plot the topics’ discussions comparing the sentiment between competitors, delivering strategic insights to the client starting from complex and unstructured data.
Value Creation
Grow enterprise value by identifying and implementing value creation opportunities and optimising business performance through real time analysis. Drive strategic and operational improvements by applying cloud based analytics to bring greater transparency.
Case studies
- Payments operational transformation
- Working capital management and effective operational planning
- Price elasticity to create upside
Payments operational transformation
A combination of industry expertise, innovative thinking and agile analytics can quantify opportunities across the value chain to drive greater digital automation.
€7m immediate cost savings identified
Our client is a large payments processing business in Europe. They provide payment processing solutions and point-of-sale hardware which means they have to manage a complex matrix of operational costs.
Through organic and acquisitive growth, the cost base and processes were understandably suboptimal, making it difficult to not only quantify their cost base but also identify their biggest opportunities across the value chain.
The challenge
The client wanted to reduce their operational costs but with poor visibility of where the cost inefficiencies existed, they required a different, data-driven approach to identify, quantify and prioritise cost reduction initiatives.
This necessitated a sophisticated understanding of cost drivers across customers, delivery processes and product offerings and then benchmarking these costs against both their acquired businesses and competitors to identify opportunities for improvement.
The outcome
Our global network of specialists worked closely with the client over a four month period to create a detailed cost to serve analytics tool which empirically proved the drivers of costs across customers, products and value chain processes.
The findings were brought to life using a fully interactive visualisation platform which was used to develop cost reduction initiatives, giving a depth of insight never available in the past. The result was €7m annual savings in the current year transformation plan, and a further €40m from best in class digital process automation in the longer term.
Working capital management and effective operational planning
The client was a DIY painting manufacturer that grew via acquisitions which resulted in a broad market and product portfolio (5 geographies & 80K+ products).
Stock value reduced by 18% and Days Inventory Outstanding by 15%
To rationalize the supply chain and reduce the Working Capital we developed an ad-hoc ETL tool and a set of strategic and operational dashboards. This approach ensured the client business continuity, accelerated cash generation and optimized service level.
The challenge
The company supply chain was disrupted with unclear responsibilities and unstandardized processes; data size was large and on different IT systems. The company was facing high levels of inventory and service level issues both internally and to customers.
The outcome
By focusing on three product macro clusters: inactive, overstocked and continuously sold, we reduced the stock value by 18%, DIO by 15% and increased the service level, all the while increasing sales. The definition of key clients-items-suppliers further optimized the service level, leading to increased customer satisfaction and operational improvements.
Price elasticity to create upside
Achieve margin uplifts through pricing elasticity and benchmarking analysis to discover immediate price improvements and create sustainable value in the future.
€750k uplift without changing market position
A leading provider of private healthcare was experiencing profitable growth but had noticed varying pricing levels between hospitals.They wanted to understand the extent of the pricing variation to identify potential opportunities for price increases.
The challenge
The client firstly wanted to establish their current local pricing position and determine price consistency for similar operations in hospitals across different locations. Secondly, they wanted to benchmark this against their competitors, to get an understanding of the price variation overall and assess potential margin gain. They also wanted to identify and quantify other opportunities to improve their price setting strategies to facilitate more sustainable and consistent margin delivery in the future.
The outcome
We conducted a detailed review on the individual transaction data of the pricing, volume and revenue data across a selection of key operations to assess pricing elasticity.
It was found that prices were broadly in line with competitors, but there was significant variability within hospitals across different locations and in how the organisation was positioned against competitors. This suggested potential opportunities to increase prices and improve margin.
Through localised price increases, an immediate margin uplift of €750k was identified without even changing market position. Further upsides of over €1m were also identified that required more radical changes to the client's proposition and marketing.
Focus areas and techniques
Our wide range of advanced analytical tools and techniques can provide innovative solutions and derive insight for our clients. Here are a few examples of where we have applied these approaches.
