The Situation
Three legal entities — a parent and two operating subsidiaries — ran as one custom manufacturing business with shared overhead, fragmented reporting, and no consolidated view of the actual operating economics. Each entity closed on its own schedule. Each had its own chart of accounts. The strategic picture lived in a CFO’s head, not in a system.
Leadership couldn’t answer basic strategic questions — gross margin by brand, capacity utilization by line, contribution by SKU without three days of manual work.
What CEI did
Designed a consolidated FP&A framework across the three entities — shared chart of accounts, harmonized close calendar, and a single reporting layer that pulled actuals into a strategic view without forcing the accounting teams to abandon their own books.
Built monthly performance reporting that ran from the consolidated view down to brand-level, product-line, and channel-level contribution.
Stood up the operational KPI dashboard: capacity utilization, throughput by line, SG&A as a percentage of revenue at the brand level, and gross margin trend per brand.
Established the discipline of meaningful month-over-month variance commentary — what moved, why, what the operations team should do about it, and what to watch next month.
3 -> 1
Operating Entities Consolidated to One View
Brand-Level
Margin Visibility Live
Monthly
Strategic Reporting Cadence Locked in
Leadership stopped running three businesses by feel and started running one business with three brands. Strategic conversations moved up a level — from “what happened” to “what should we do about it.”
In Their Words
“We were running three businesses pretending to be one company. CEI made us actually be one company — with three brands that we could finally measure.”
— President | Confidential Client