A future-state vision for enterprise performance management across a global finance organization.
The Enterprise Performance Management workstream was the strategic spine of J&J's Finance Systems & Technology transformation. It spanned three finance capability areas. Close, Consolidations & External Reporting. Planning & Forecasting. Management Reporting. Across J&J's global finance organization and its four operating sectors.
Zenda was engaged to lead the human-centered design and future-state operating-model strands of the broader FS&T transformation. As Senior Design Consultant at Zenda, I led the HCD research strand for Long-Term Planning and Monthly Business Review. The two processes most tightly bound to the close and planning cycles. The two most likely to expose the human cost of a fragmented operating model.
The HCD research was conducted across J&J operating sites in Titusville and Horsham, supported by remote sessions across multiple time zones. The contextual-inquiry work focused on how finance teams actually executed Long-Term planning and the Monthly Business Review. Not how those processes were documented to run.
The findings reframed the business case. Gross-to-Net Long-Term planning teams were spending the majority of their planning workload on data cleaning. Manually preparing non-standard, non-J&J-owned data before any actual planning work could begin. The same teams required approximately three days to complete a recurring process that peer finance functions completed in approximately half a day.
The pattern was structural. The work finance teams were paid to do was being absorbed by the work they were actually doing. The work they were actually doing was upstream of, and structurally enabling, the work they were paid to do. No single team owned the upstream work, so it kept landing on the downstream teams as friction.
The work finance teams were paid to do was being absorbed by the work they were actually doing. LT/MBR Research Findings · Field synthesis
To make the future-state argument inside the Executive Conceptual Design, the work introduced the Four Pillars framework. Human, Data, Technology, Procedural. An analytical model the leadership team could use to evaluate decisions, sequence interventions, and trade off scope.
Each pillar was named as an equal partner in the future-state design, with explicit accountability for a share of the close, plan, forecast, and report cycles. A change to any one pillar required corresponding changes in the others. Descoping one pillar meant accepting the cost in the others. Positioned this way, the framework was load-bearing inside the Conceptual Design. Not a chapter that could be deleted without rewriting the spine.
The 90% data-cleaning insight landed in the business case, not the appendix. The 3-day versus 0.5-day operational drag was made legible at CFO level. The numbers were research-anchored, calibrated against peer-function baselines already operating inside J&J. Internal benchmarks beat external benchmarks every time the work has to defend itself at the executive committee.
The framework appeared early in the Conceptual Design, then again in the future-state sections, then again in the change-roadmap sequencing. It was structural to the document, not decorative. That positioning ensured the human layer remained load-bearing through the Detailed Design phase that followed.
A specific opportunity was surfaced in the research. Closing the Gross-to-Net cycle from approximately 3 days to approximately 0.5 days through coordinated data-quality and ownership redesign. The number was not a forecast. It was a threshold, drawn from the peer-function baseline already operating inside J&J.
The 66-slide Executive Package was delivered for CFO-level designee review on November 1, 2019. Feedback closed November 15. The Detailed Design phase kicked off thereafter.
The framework was structural to the document, not decorative. The human layer stayed load-bearing through Detailed Design. Executive Conceptual Design · J&J FS&T
Framing the future-state vision and change roadmap across four operating sectors and three finance capability areas.
Keeping the HCD layer load-bearing through Detailed Design, not deletable as a later-phase chapter.
Not benchmark estimates. Internal baselines already operating inside J&J, calibrated through the field research.
A working benchmark for the multi-year transformation. A threshold, not a forecast.
HCD research across five international sites. 200+ finance stakeholders synthesized. Operating model and smart-form UX that consolidated five submission channels into one RACI-governed workflow.
A four-layer integrated artifact: 15+ roles, 11 lifecycle phases, 3 account tiers, team-emotion overlay. One surface for leadership to argue from, not three decks to reconcile.
Twenty years across pharma, finance, non-profit, hospitality, and tech. Cases on request.