737: The Future Before Us | Chris Kuehn, CFO, Trane Technologies

It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand’s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by “turning over every rock in the company” to nullify the possibility of unforeseen snags. Recalls Chris Kuehn, who at the time served as Ingersoll Rand’s chief accounting officer: “I remember Mike coming back and telling us that he had never been through an IPO in his career, but this transaction was likely going to be the closest he ever got to one.” Today, Kuehn is CFO of Trane Technologies, the spinoff and resulting offspring of the transaction that involved the merger of Ingersoll Rand’s industrial business, Milwaukee-based Gardner Denver. “Mike didn’t want us to accept the status quo. He wanted us to review every one of the 600 cost centers and every organizational chart and function,” continues Kuehn, who adds that the exhaustive process spanned between six and nine months. Part of engineering the spinoff’s early success, Kuehn explains, involved proactively moving processes that had been managed centrally to regional locations where they would be better suited for the management of the entity’s future operations.    Still, putting a reorganization in motion on the eve of a defining transaction is no doubt a tricky management feat, especially when the dimensions of the proposed spinoff are not yet fully visible to the company’s incumbent employees.   According to Kuehn, the approaching transaction deadlines brought an operational opportunity into view. He comments: “We said, ‘Let’s be courageous enough to change what has not been working, with a bias to moving those processes that are centrally led.’” For Kuehn, the reorganization and eventual 2019 transaction swung open the door to Trane’s CFO office, where the finance and operational opportunity remains front-and-center. “We’re still on the journey today,” he points out. “We’re not done, but this has certainly allowed me to get inside the finance function as well as our other global functions and see what is working well and what we need to change.” –Jack Sweeney