Alastair Littlewood

Company Overview: The UK’s largest vehicle remarketing business, covering vehicle distribution, sale and refurbishment

• Inspection of end of lease vehicles, and delivery to specified locations
• The role involved an element of planning to ensure accurate communication of arrival times to customers, and collections made at minimal cost and time

Company Overview: Top 4 UK grocery retailer

• Short term cashflow creation, which I continuously evolved to give greater accountability to business units in order to drive accuracy
• Accounts payable forecasting, a key constituent of the cashflow
• Net debt forecasting and reporting (heavily relied upon at senior levels at half year and full year end)
• Foreign exchange hedging (through a combination of forwards and options)
• Treasury reporting, which I enhanced to give greater transparency and insight to senior management
• Maintained relationships with card schemes and our card acquirer, whom I liaised with regularly to drive improvement for business areas, primarily digital and online
• Ran the tender process for online gateway provider and estate-wide card acquirer, ensuring the participation of all business stakeholders
• Participation in three early bond repayments and one new bond issue

Company Overview: Leading UK building society

• Enhanced organisational efficiency with comprehensive internal audits including corporate reporting, enterprise risk, supplier risk management and quarterly reviews of the Treasury function
• Involved in the redesign of Treasury audit methodology and approach

Company Overview: Part of the Bibby Group, comprises mainly franchised convenience stores

• Implemented a robust and repeatable suite of weekly management information reports, including sales, margin and availability reports, as well as ad hoc analysis of margin on promotional lines sold

Company Overview: Top 4 UK grocery retailer

Recruited internally for a newly-created role in recognition of my strengths in reporting and process simplification demonstrated as Group Treasury Manager

• Production of weekly and monthly reports showing delivery of the IT project portfolio (cost and time) versus plan, and identifying areas for process improvement
• Created a weekly report showing overall “Portfolio Health” (balanced scorecard) - used in CIO steering group for discussion with peers across Asda, and adopted by Wal-Mart as global best practice to be rolled out across the World
• Developed a new suite of exception reports to act as an “early warning system” for project slippage to plan and to flag data integrity issues within the project database
• Streamlined departmental time submission and reporting process, resulting in more accurate charging of resource costs to projects
• 500 stores, turnover £24bn, 150,000 colleagues

Initially seconded from Internal Audit as maternity cover following my help with clearance of aged bank reconciliation items, the Corporate Finance Director and Treasurer invited me to become a permanent member of the team

• Line manager of 2.5 FTEs
• Short term cashflow creation (up to 2 years in advance (daily granularity) and daily maintenance
• Placed short term money market investments (up to £800m at any one time)
• Foreign exchange trading (spot and forwards, approximately £1bn per annum, primarily USD and EUR)
• Bank reconciliation oversight
• Identification and facilitation of intercompany loan requirements
• Implemented payment card chargeback analysis (transactions disputed by cardholders), identifying a huge risk in the in the home shopping business (approximately £500k per month benefit), and became an active participant in process improvement workshops with the Home Shopping and IT teams
• Automated the reporting process for interest receivable / payable favourability / adversity to plan, enabling real-time review
• Semi automated the main stores’ bank account reconciliation, reducing preparation time from 2 hours to minutes
• Documented and streamlined other Treasury processes, empowering members to share their knowledge with peers to establish best practice and eliminate single points of failure
• Hosted workshops with Accounts Payable / Corporate Accounts teams to highlight common touch points and to encourage inter-team communication
• Introduced a well received weekly bulletin to a range of business-wide stakeholders with varying needs and levels of understanding, from product buyers to the CFO, which communicated indicative forex rates (for trading negotiation purposes) and explained the reasons for week on week exchange rate movements

Offered a role after working directly with Asda's Audit Director during the course of my work at Andersen

• Conducted reviews of many business areas (stores, distribution, head office and Gazeley, a property subsidiary of Asda), which included financial, compliance and operational efficiency
• Part of a 25 person team – identified as the only member to have truly “cross-functional" skills, enabling me to audit across all areas of the business
• Co-created the Distribution centre audit process
• Developed and maintained the team’s “audit dashboard” which showed, by team member, all audit points and agreed resolution dates to facilitate timely follow up
• Key role in the development and successful implementation of an intranet based stores self assessment tool, displaying user-definable summaries by region and time period
• Leverage my Excel skills to produce a beginners’ user guide, explaining how to use simple functions such as pivot tables, VLOOKUP and IF statements to simplify raw data. This was rolled out across my peers

Company Overview: Formerly one of the “Big 5” accountancy, audit and advisory firms, providing auditing tax and business consultancy services. The UK entity was bought by Deloitte in 2002

• Performed process mapping and one-off process reviews at many household name companies, as well as compliance reviews at one of the Leeds office’s largest clients
• Became the UK and European specialist in Ballot / Resolver risk voting software, using this in client Board-level risk workshops, authoring a simple but thorough user guide to aid my global peers, and often being contacted for support

• Commenced in a data input / accounts payable style role, matching invoices for hospital treatment at a number of GP practices in the Wakefield district
• Progressed quickly to team leader, training new starters, ensuring that NHS trusts were paid timely, monitoring practice spends against budgets, and creating monthly finance packs