Finance leaders inside consumer goods companies have spent years absorbing volatility through cost programs, synergy models and procurement negotiations.
Many of those tools were built for a world where disruption was episodic and margin recovery was more predictable. That world has changed. Geopolitical fragmentation, structural inflation and the complexity of post-merger integration at global scale have exposed a gap in how supply chain finance is taught, practiced and passed on.
The textbooks cover theory. Business programs cover frameworks.
Masha Chandrasekaran, associate director of supply chain finance at Unilever and a senior IEEE member, has spent more than a decade at that intersection. Her work has included merger integration, supply chain investment governance and logistics redesign across global consumer goods operations.
That experience is now the basis for her book, The Finance Imperative: How Finance Leaders Can Own the Economics of Global Supply Chain Transformation: A Practitioner’s Framework for Post-Merger Integration, Cost Strategy and Capital Governance.
The book argues that finance teams are increasingly involved in designing the economics of transformation, not just tracking results after decisions are made.
Finance as decision architecture
The book opens with a premise Chandrasekaran encountered throughout her career: post-merger integration literature often underweights the finance operating model.
Synergy slides are common. So are frameworks for day-one readiness, workstream governance and stakeholder alignment. What is less often documented is the financial design work that determines whether modeled synergies survive contact with real operations.
That includes identifying which cost elements are structural rather than temporary, building multiyear cost and margin improvement models, working across systems and organizational cadences, and structuring governance forums that force decisions before slippage becomes a pattern.
Integration under pressure
The book’s integration chapters draw on Chandrasekaran’s work connected to the GSK Consumer Healthcare merger, a major FMCG transaction in India.
Her account focuses less on the public-facing deal narrative and more on the operational difficulty behind it: multiple workstreams running across SAP migration, vendor onboarding, master data alignment, product costing and supply chain reconciliation.
Those efforts had to be coordinated across stakeholders, systems and organizational cultures while the program moved forward under pandemic-era constraints.
It is that the finance function often becomes the place where commercial ambition, operational constraints and capital discipline have to meet.
Governing investment portfolios
Another major section of the book focuses on upstream investment decisions at enterprise scale.
Chandrasekaran draws on her experience with a global value chain intervention portfolio involving projects across multiple countries and categories. The challenge was not simply evaluating one business case at a time. It was maintaining consistent investment discipline across capital expenditures, supplier partnerships, long-term offtake structures and market-specific risk profiles.
The book describes an investment evaluation approach that includes return modeling, discounted cash flow analysis, cost-curve review, total-landed-cost analysis and hurdle rates calibrated to geography-specific dynamics.
It also emphasizes the importance of portfolio-level governance, including dashboards that track savings delivery, capital deployment and payback performance across business groups.
“The mistake most companies make is approving projects individually and managing portfolios accidentally,” Chandrasekaran writes. “Portfolio governance is the mechanism that converts a set of good investment cases into a structural cost position.”
Finance as a transformation catalyst
Chandrasekaran’s work on these issues has also appeared in professional supply chain and business publications.
Her article “Finance as a Transformation Catalyst: A How-To Guide for Supply Chain Finance Leaders,” published in Supply Chain Management Review, explores how finance teams can move from cost tracking to structural value creation.
Her Forbes article The New Standard For Supply Chain Cost Transformation And How Finance Is Leading The Way extends that argument into the integration context, examining how supply chain decisions made early in a merger can determine whether projected synergies are actually realized.
A practical framework for finance leaders
“The Finance Imperative” is ultimately about a shift in how finance leaders understand their role.
It is not focused on the theory of that shift, but on the mechanics of what it looks like when finance owns a transformation program, builds the cost model, runs governance, manages escalation and helps deliver margin improvement.
Chandrasekaran is direct about the limits of any playbook. Markets differ. Regulatory environments differ. Organization structures differ.
“What I can give you is the frame,” she writes. “The frame for how to think about investment decisions, how to build governance that creates accountability, and how to know when your cost programme is solving the right problem. The rest is the work only you can do in your specific organisation.”
It gives supply chain finance leaders a way to think about transformation as a discipline rather than a collection of one-off cost programs.
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