Here's the situation, plain as I can lay it out.
Company's got a pipeline business that hit its revenue ceiling in Liquids a couple years quicker than anybody planned for — which in my experience just means somebody upstairs was doing math they wanted to be true instead of math that was true. Meantime the CEO's already halfway out the door and told the shareholders there's a dividend increase coming, like a man promising a woman flowers before he's checked if the truck's even got gas in it. Now there's a hole in the budget and a promise that's already out the door and can't be walked back without looking weak, and weak ain't a look CEOs favor.
They spent three years on some transformation program — N75, whatever they're calling it — s'posed to teach the whole company how to run leaner and smarter. What it actually did was fix a couple small things and then discover outsourcing, which is the corporate version of not doing the dishes and just eating off paper plates. Looks like progress for a while. Ain't nobody teaching anybody nothing. The people running that program were more interested in everybody feeling good about it than anybody actually being right about it — which is how you end up with three years and a stack of PowerPoints and not much else to show.
So now the CFO, decent man far as I can tell, figures somebody's gotta go first, and it might as well be him — starts gutting his own department to prove he'll make the hard calls before he asks anyone else to. Only trouble is, cutting without fixing the process just moves the hurt down the hall. Outsource the finance work, centralize what's left, and all you've done is hide where the bodies are buried, not bury fewer of 'em. Somebody else picks up that work now, some vendor who don't know the business, and the risk don't go away — it just goes quiet for a while.
Way I see it, that's a company that made a promise it couldn't keep, and it's about to spend the next year proving it, one department at a time, while everybody who saw it coming stays quiet and waits to see whose name ends up on it when the bill finally comes due.