Finding simplicity in chaos.
About
For Affy Bhatti, there is calm in chaos and a sense in complexity. Affy’s ability to navigate through complexity has been well established across a 19-year career transforming businesses and providing trusted advice to executives of the ASX20 as well as to the government and Ministers across most industries and sectors and in every major city of Australia. From setting up the $20B Coles demerger from scratch to assessing whether a $3B state of the art hospital could be opened to the general public, there is always a hands-on, personal commitment to navigating uncertainty and implementing solutions in impossible timeframes. Beyond the corporate world, he is passionate about affecting change at a community level, sitting on the board of several not-for-profit, community-minded organisations.
Affy thrives in readying businesses for change and then personally overseeing that change with guidance, direction, and experience. Engaging high-level leadership and guiding teams of hundreds of employees from all business areas with unifying effect.
The end goal is always the same: helping businesses achieve tangible and sustainable gains by personally engaging with them at each step of the journey while untangling complexity in a way that only he can.
War Stories
Setting up and successfully navigating the largest corporate transaction in Australia’s history
Following the 2018 announcement of Wesfarmers intention to demerge its Coles division, Affy was headhunted to set up, manage and deliver the $20B economic and legal separation of Coles from Wesfarmers, with Wesfarmers’ shareholders approving the demerger and Coles commencing trading on the ASX on 21 November 2018.
Affy engaged, briefed, and worked with nominated Coles team members (General Manager and Head of level) and backfilled their roles with consultants or contractors so that they could focus on Day 1 readiness activities. He set up a core team that largely worked in one room, fostering a collaborative and fun work environment and achieved almost impossible outcomes, including implementing a new Treasury Management System in 12 weeks and sourcing and running $4B through it.
Affy developed and managed its $150M budget, drove the development of 24 workstream charters, and developed an integrated work plan incorporating 17 x project schedules. He also managed, coordinated, and oversaw Day 1 readiness activities including setup of new functions and sub-functions and related processes, including a Company Secretariat, Treasury, Group Tax, Audit and Insurance and the associated recruitment of 53 new team members and implementation of 43 IT systems and obtaining consents from 54 property leases and 40 vendors.
Assessing whether a state of the art $3B hospital could be opened to the general public
As part of a Public-Private Partnership, the Department of Health and Ageing South Australia was building the $3B new Royal Adelaide Hospital (nRAH), Australia’s most advanced hospital, the single largest infrastructure project in the State’s history, and the largest health precinct in the southern hemisphere.
Affy was part of a team of experts that were asked to assess the state of readiness to move from the existing Royal Adelaide Hospital to the nRAH on 1 July 2017 on behalf of the nRAH relocation leadership team and other senior stakeholders responsible for making decisions around the opening date of the nRAH.
Affy led the rapid ICT readiness of both the platform and applications; End-User Computing (EUC) devices and applications deployed, access to patient records, and whether telephony and messaging solution and devices were deployed, configured and tested and authored recommendations in a ‘Cabinet in Confidence’ report, outlining outstanding actions to help the nRAH meet its deadline in a highly politicised environment.
Helping to pay back wages to vulnerable workers
Affy was trusted to kickstart momentum on the second-largest payroll remediation program in the history of corporate Australia - a disjointed program of 156 resources with no program plan, a poor structure that had spent $19.2M of the then $37.9M budget but delivered very little, despite a heavy reliance on 70 top-tier consultants to investigate and remediate.
Affy restructured the team, deployed one way of working with an integrated plan and got additional funding (increasing budget to $49.66M) and developed internal capability to investigate, quantify and remediate.
Within 10 months, Affy achieved the investigation of 149 issues, implementation of 16 fixes (including the largest SAP change since SAP was implemented in 2006) and processed 43 payments across 176,914 transactions to 62,404 colleagues (including 40,041 former colleagues), committing $121M. Affy balanced commercial and legal risks to reduce the back pay exposure liability from $196M to $137M.
Untangling the threads of corporate chaos is Affy Bhatti’s passion. If you’d like to learn more about Affy’s work, have a scenario to discuss, or would just like to say hello, please feel free to get in touch.