Business Process Consultant, Kuwait

Who decides what in a Kuwaiti family group

In many Kuwaiti groups, the owners are closely involved in daily business, and that involvement is a strength. The difficulty comes with scale. When every purchase above a modest level, every new hire and every credit exception goes to a family member, decisions wait for their availability, and managers lose the habit of deciding anything themselves.

A process engagement gives the owners a structured way to decide what they want to keep. I interview the family board members or senior owners, the group's chief executive or general manager, the head of finance and the managers of each company. I then list every type of decision that currently reaches the top, and for each one ask: who should decide this, up to what level, with what information, and who should be told afterwards?

The result is an approval matrix in tiers:

• Family board: strategic decisions, major investments, new companies, senior appointments.
• Group leadership: budgets, larger contracts, group-wide policies, bank facilities.
• Group functions: procurement within budget, payments, credit limits, hiring within headcount.
• Company managers: day-to-day purchases, discounts and staffing within their limits.

Signatory rights and bank mandates are set through legal and banking documents, which stay with your lawyers and banks. The matrix describes the business decision, and it becomes the basis for approval workflows later.

Shared services that serve several companies

Groups often centralize procurement, finance, HR and IT so that one team serves every company. The logic is sound, but without a defined process the shared team becomes a bottleneck. Requests arrive by phone, email and message from different managers. Each company believes its work is most urgent. Costs of the shared team sit in the holding company and are recharged, if at all, by an estimate at year-end.

I map each shared service from the requesting company's side and from the shared team's side. The questions are practical:

• How does a company submit a request, and what information must it include?
• Who in the shared team picks it up, and how is priority set when several companies ask at once?
• What response can each company expect, described in words rather than promised figures?
• How does the requesting company confirm the work is done?
• How are the costs of the service shared, and when?

The recharge question deserves its own routine. Agreeing in advance how shared costs are allocated, for example by headcount, transaction volume or a fixed share, and running the recharge every month makes intercompany balances predictable. Your auditor and tax advisor confirm whether the basis is acceptable for any group companies with external reporting or tax obligations.

The Kuwait ERP consultant page covers how a multi-company ERP can support this once the process is agreed.

Cash, cards and checks at outlets and branches

Retail, food and beverage and service groups in Kuwait handle a mix of card payments, cash and, for business customers, checks. Each outlet usually develops its own closing habits, and head office sees only the totals that arrive the next day.

I map the daily cash routine at a sample of outlets, then design one group procedure that covers:

• opening float and who issues it;
• end-of-day count by the cashier, checked by the supervisor;
• safe custody overnight and who holds the keys or codes;
• deposit timing and how the deposit is evidenced;
• comparison of card terminal totals with the system, with differences reported the same day;
• what happens when cash is short or over, and who signs off the explanation.

For business customers paying by check, the process sets who may accept a check and under what conditions, how checks are recorded when received, who holds them until deposit, and the steps when a check is returned. Legal questions about returned checks belong with your lawyer; the process makes sure the business knows which checks it holds and who acts next.

Card settlement reconciliation is often handled by an integration with the payment provider, which my Kuwait system integration page covers. The process work makes sure the people side is consistent, so the reconciliation has clean data to work with. A procedure that a cashier in any outlet can follow is the main deliverable here.

Residency renewals and the group PRO desk

A Kuwaiti group with several companies may employ staff under different company sponsorships, each with its own licenses, authorized signatory documents and employee residency and work permit records. Renewals for all of them often sit with a small government relations team, tracked in personal spreadsheets and email.

I map hire to pay for the group with the PRO work included: from an approved vacancy through offer, permits and residency, onboarding and salary setup, to renewals and exit. Drawn as one flow, the gaps become obvious. Employee documents are collected several times by different teams. Company license and signatory document renewals are tracked separately from employee renewals. Salary transfers proceed for staff whose documents have lapsed because payroll never hears about it.

The future design creates a single group PRO desk process:

• one record of every company and employee document with its expiry;
• a trigger for each renewal, owned by a named person;
• a standard request from the PRO desk to the employee or company manager;
• a link to payroll so status changes are known before salaries are paid;
• an exit checklist shared by HR, PRO, finance and IT.

Residency, permit and salary rules are matters for the authorities and your HR advisors. The engagement runs in English, and Arabic forms or letters are prepared or checked by your own staff or a local partner. My role is making the internal process visible and owned.

No VAT, process ownership and what follows

Kuwait has not introduced VAT, so there is no periodic tax return imposing a structure on invoicing and purchasing. Some group companies may still have tax or reporting obligations depending on ownership and activity, and your advisor confirms these. For process design, the consequence is that discipline depends on the owners and managers rather than on a filing calendar, which makes clear ownership even more important.

Each mapped process gets an owner, someone senior enough to change it and close to its daily operation. For a group, I also recommend a light governance routine: process owners from each company meet periodically with group leadership to review issues, agree changes and keep companies aligned. Owners in this setup look at practical signs, such as approvals waiting, recharges disputed or outlets closing late.

The work is remote. Interviews with owners and board members can be arranged around their schedules, workshops with managers and shared teams run on video, and visits happen only by arrangement. I can also prepare a short briefing for the chairman or family board on the proposed approval matrix.

After the design is agreed, the group can decide on the next step: better use of existing systems, targeted automation as described on my Kuwait business automation page, or a group ERP. I take no commissions from vendors. See business process consulting or the Kuwait overview for more.