Pepsi Co – hedge fund management tool
When Pepsico needed a hedge fund management tool to manage the performance of hundreds of millions of dollars of hedge funds purchased for their operations in Europe, they turned to the Excel Expert.
The tool we developed helps Pepsico save over 2,500 man hours a year!
The client
A multi-billion dollar food and drinks company with thousands of production facilities around the world. It owns household brands that include Pepsi, Walkers, 7Up, Doritos, Gatorade, Lays, Cheetos, Smiths, Snack-a-Jacks, Quaker, Tropicana, Lipton and Mountain Dew.
The problem
Pepsico have recently completed a $3 billion acquisition push, adding several more brands and dozens of manufacturing plants to their portfolio.
To maximise their revenue they plan their purchasing months and sometimes years in advance. As some of these purchases are cross border purchases, Pepsi Co was potentially exposed to the risk of fluctuations in exchange rates and needed to hedge their billions of dollars of purchasing spend.
Their process for purchasing hedge funds was to use a combination of faxes, emails and phone calls resulting in frequent errors and missed deadlines.
The solution
We developed an Excel application that allowed each of their manufacturing plants to enter their projected purchasing requirements, cash flow requirements and forecasted exchange rates.
The application then processed this information generating several reports and the relevant documentation to process the purchasing of hedge funds via banks in New York.
The application then took in the financial data from New York and monitored the performance of the hedge fund against what was forecasted.
The result
The application is currently in use in every Pepsi production plant throughout Europe and an additional phase to the project is in the pipeline.
The number of errors, missed deadlines and time spent processing the hedge funds has been greatly reduced
Pepsico have also seen a time saving of approximately 2,500 working days a year, spread across their manufacturing plants and their European HQ in Geneva.