This company had accumulated a balance sheet bad debt of £200+m over a period of 5 years and this project was initiated to solve the problem.

On arrival, HCL found that the key project objective was to reclaim the debt. HCL changed this to being identification first, followed by write-off or reclamation. This was an important change because the Board had been given to understand that most of the debt was reclaimable. In fact, the vagaries of a defective IT system had allowed consistent overstatement of revenues over the 5 year period and much of the debt was illusory. As a result, by the end of the project the organisation had written off £100+m.