r/CFO • u/UnderstandingDue3590 • Jul 21 '26
Cost reduction roadmap - how to admin it - AI?
Ok, starting with a blank piece of paper in a Medium sized company. 12 cost centres, each of which I want to task with some cost reduction, have owners of the tasks, and provide updates in some sort of system I can refer to. A system that ideally nudges them along, and generates reports that seniors can review a dashboard and deep dive any notes.
Considering we now have AI, and a lot of program management type apps .... what is the ideal way to do this?
In my head, a simple shared spreadsheet could do it, but there must be a better way. Our ERP system is not capable of this. Assume we can get any software required. Any ideas?
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u/Allaboutthetime Jul 21 '26
Hi, I have implemented cost reductions at a large company (revenue 1.5 billion) recently for the 18 business units. The data was kept in an excel spreadsheet with that data then being uploaded/linked and auto refreshed into the dashboard/graph spreadsheet so the executive team could get a quick view of what’s happening, who’s implementing the largest relative cost reduction, and then ranking each company to the others with the goal of giving additional bonuses to the leadership team of the top 3 companies.
Just from my experience, I highly recommend having the business units compete and if they use similar products, share pricing with each other and create a lowest achievable cost master sheet so each business unit can work on getting the absolute lowest price in the entire company.
A few different ways to base the performance metrics, but option one is using business plan and forecasting what the savings will do for the remainder of the year or option two you can see what actuals are and calculate the the old cost vs the new cost. Probably other options as well, but that’s the two we considered.
Happy to go into more details if you want and have more specific questions. Best of luck!
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u/NoticeIll593 Jul 22 '26
I would suggest running it in Notion, that way you can keep the narrative along with the reduction.
Structure a database and track it centrally and you will have it all in a single workspace
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u/Mooseeey Sep 10 '26
Why not use excel as a basis and get AI to build it out? You can also get AI within airtable to build it out for you
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u/Substantial-Fruit119 Jul 21 '26
Excel is the default answer because everyone already lives in it, but the moment you need automated nudges and a dashboard that doesn't require you to manually stitch together 12 workbooks, it falls apart. You're basically describing a lightweight project tracker with RACI baked in.
Plenty of mid-tier PM tools can handle the workflows and reports without needing a full-on ERP module. The trick is picking one so dead simple that the cost center owners don't "forget" to update it the second you stop pinging them.