Operations to enable to better the business they serve and have moved beyond traditional cost reduction to embrace new technology, practices and talent to move beyond incremental gains. See Gianni Giacomelli, SVP, Genpact and Phil Fersht, CEO, Hfs Research explain how to do this.
8. Importance of Program Objectives Today
Respondents from $3B+ Enterprises
Drive process efficiency (i.e. cycle time, quality)
Very
Important
Increase scalability and flexibility of operations
Somewhat
Important
Reduce costs
Support global growth strategy
Not
Important
Transform processes (e.g. cross-functional process
redesign, automation)
Align support services with global corporate strategy
Improve compliance capabilities
Outsourcing Smart Governance Disruptive Technologies
Today’s operations aims have moved beyond the
traditional cost reduction…
Drive cultural change
Gain access to talent and capabilities
improve access to technology
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
% of Respondents
Source: HfS Research and PwC 2012, N = 188 Respondents from enterprises with more than $3B in revenue
8
9. Q. How important are the following objectives to your team today, compared to when
you first started your SSO program?
Improving Analytics
32%
Defining Business Outcomes Beyond Cost Reduction and …
28%
Raising the Bar for Existing SLAs
28%
Driving Innovation
28%
Defining and Adding New In-Scope Processes
25%
External Benchmarking
24%
Improving Service Provider Relationships
23%
Improving Industry Acumen
20%
Adding Addition Volumes to Existing Services
19%
Influencing Executives
14%
Contract Negotiation
14%
Managing Financial Business Cases
13%
SLA Performance Management
12%
Service Provider Selection
Managing Transitions
Outsourcing Smart Governance Disruptive Technologies
…and require strategy - embracing new technology,
practices and talent to move beyond incremental gains
11%
9%
Increase in importance
Source: HfS Research 2012, N = 198 Buy-side Executives
9
22. POLL
Where do you think new collaboration technology and
practices will have the most immediate effect?
1. Traditional offshore captives/BPO collaborating with
onshore retained org
2. Traditional onshore regional centers collaborating with
retained org
3. Work-from-home collaborating with office based org
4. Collaboration for new services e.g. analytics, FP&A, AML
in captive/BPO
22
30. Q. How would you describe your satisfaction with your current role as it relates to…
Satisfied
Neither
Satisfied or
Unsatisfied
Unsatisfied
Career
Career
Compensation Intellectual
Opportunities Opportunities
Challenge
Outside of
Within Your
Your
Organization
Organization
Non-Monetary
Skill
Recognition Development
Outsourcing Smart Governance Disruptive Technologies
However, Ops leadership issue must be addressed
Workload
Dissatisfaction with career opportunities Ops may dissuade
the top caliber needed for real transformation
Source: HfS Research 2012, N = 278 Buy-side Executives and 162 Sell-side Executives
30
60,000+ associatesGE spin-off, NYSE “G”Pioneer in globalbusiness process managementInitial core F&A and Financial Services ops, now includes ops consulting, analytics operations, and IT– across industriesUnique perspective on operations process as a science thanks to our Smart Enterprise Process (SEP) framework
At stake is the ability of operations – be they in internal LoBs, Shared Services, Operating Centers or GBS - to enable the business they serve. There is a lot more complexity,global complexity, in what we do. Operations are the place where you can do things at scale. But operations arent very good at speed of reaction, they are optimized for scale and not for flexibility. But should it be so? Certainly, the business they serve needs more…on two accountsOffense – in a two-speed growth economy, where the developing market is a tricky land grab and the developed markets show growth in hard-to-find but profitable niches, help the front lines penetrate new markets without losing control…or enable the right insight and reaction speed to conquer micro marketsDefense – accommodate more volatile business cycle by reducing cost and making it more variable – for example, in industries where the cost of raw materials is volatile, the pricing power limited, and consumer demand difficult to forecast granularly, 100s of basis point of EBITs are at stake – and billions of dollars of market valuation as well…as it has been the case in CPG in the last ten yearSustain cost effectively the impetus of new regulations – be they for capital markets, AML or Finance and Accounting – where the fines are hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as the additional costs
Let’s not start from technology. Let’s start from something more obvious – the right amount of the right people in the right places to do the work you need – transactional, rule based, judgment based, data driven, what have you. Always been tough, and it is becoming tougherGlobal talent imbalances are growing wild - for example, the US alone will soon lack 200,000 data scientists per year. At the same time, many skills will become obsolete because of automation and increasingly economically unviable cost differentials – this is a big shiftBaby boomers are retiring – but many need and want to work on their terms. And many mothers-at-home will be even more badly needed – at work
No wonder that a lot more will be performed in ways that aren’t mainstream today – 60% of HR executives believe that the future will see more part-time, temporary, semi-retired, offshore, or work-from-home staff. The traditional office model (everyone under the same roof, 5 days a week, 9-6, a few weeks of holiday) is under pressure to maintain efficiency and effectiveness
Is the solution banal?Of course not. Take some examples – some of them are magnified by the current global operations trend – STAY HIGH LEVEL, PAUSE, DON’T GO INTO DETAIL – Phil what do you see from a people management and skills availability perspective?…Difficult to train, manage, motivate and retainpeople who are far awayHard to optimize span of control when part of your team is under another roofMore efficientUtilization of facilities conflicts with the need to keep people close to each otherIntense travel is required in times of transition, or for supervisors managing many sitesLet’s not forget that Young employees dislike gap between engaging technology at home, their iDevices or android, and ERP-like ones at workLosing capacityin a location cannot be readily balancedwith resources elsewhere…it isn’t few and far between - and we are more just in time than in the past…one glitch and your operations supply chain grinds to a haltIn times of sudden change or with severe exceptions, and in general when you need speed of execution, organizations struggle to cope…those many global “limbs” arentagilie as team members with tightly sequenced work produce good quality, but struggleto perform when collaboration is less strictly regimentedAnd what about compliance for all those people in different locations, those devices, those data setsDo uyou think that’s all tehre is, Phil?
Here we can say that the key skills we saw in the “at stake” section are in scarce supply
This is a useful practice when trying to predict the future. Let’s look at the past, and see how much of a persistency bias we have. And let’s think about the future, and decide how closely we need to follow some trends
Some examples of inflections in enterprise technology tech used by people died fast but it didn’t seem so when you're in thereFour technologies (a mix of technology and process, really)ERP is still around, after significant legacy investment and frankly some hard-earned thorough job in connecting dots between data, people, and workflows…not dying soon, but challenged by more agile things especially on the fringes of the enterprise, e.g. smaller LoBs, legal entities, new or marginal processes – ethat is why you have SaaS, mobile based solution, or even simply email based workflows
Conversely, let’s think about Enterprise technology we didn't have five years agoSome of them we didn’t even think they could be done…and of course, there is a cloud lining below each of them…which leads us to
Social technologies are rampant. Because that is what humans want to do…[commentMcK slide] Facebook has made billions dematerializing friendship – can something be harder to do than that? We all remember when being in contact with friends far away was really hard. Facebook has shown that even emotions can be shared at a distance…and it is literally taking share out of completely unrelated areas… e.g. segments of the car industry because of the reducing the mileage driven by young people. And crowdsourcing enabled by technology enabled platform is tackling a range of things – from writing guidebooks chapters, to optimizing health insurance algorithms, from cataloging galaxies for NASA to translating articles, from mapping the next local business on Apple Maps to stopping the next bout of spam on that webpage. A radically new way to collaborate is coming…and by the way, it is just much more human than anything we had before
Communications impediments are fallingDo you remember the time when calling another continent for a conf call minutes would cost the same as having dinner in a good restaurant?Data moves differently. The cost of internet bandwidth has halved every 2.5 years for the last decade. 4G is faster – and cheaper – than fixed broadband only few years back. Mobile videoconferencing is a reality – but even more importantly is the ability to access any piece of information, anywhere. Smartphones are rampantFixed line broadband is becoming much cheaper in developing economies too. Internet and the mobile version of it are ramping up as fast – are we considering the watershed implications?And this doesn’t stop with recessions
Paper and pencil have shaped our view of technology…we have tried to replicate them. But that prevents us to really do what we always wanted to doScreen pixels are doubling performance every 1.5 years, and their cost is plummeting. Four years ago tablet’s penetration was literally zero…many young children – and senior executives - don’t remember a world without them. Steve Ballmer’s 82 inch screen may not be such an extravagance soon. And by the way – perhaps you don’t need big…you just need it close to your eye…Patents are flocking to enable digital ink, that is using foldable, paper or fabric like surfaces as a screen – you will soon be able to read that budget report while on the airport escalator without inadvertently ramming into yet another slow moving tourist. Any surface can be a keyboard – you can soon type on the wall of your meeting room. And surgeons can now be thousands of miles away from where the patient is…What can this do to OPERATIONS?
One last input - what about Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype? Clearly, the master of the enterprise desktop has figured that the next gig is not email or a better version of powerpoint – it is getting people to see and talk to each other again…
There is lot riding towards the dematerialization of operations…matching people with work to be done irrespective from where they areLet’s now explore where this can goWhile distance is dying, many still don’t take advantage of it – No surprise…technology always takes time email penetrated fast, but heavy-user adoption took a decade…I know of senior executives in their ‘50s had their secretaries print emails out and would read back to them the answers…ten years agoWe will run into scalability issues – or worse. The changing work landscape will present dramatic opportunities for those who harness it and massive risks for those who ignore it. But technology alone is not the answer. Technology can be an invention…a great interesting new thing. But it creates real innovation when it is deployed in large scale…and that takes…adoption in enterprise processSo let’s talk about those
Over 90% of f&a operations are run in at least a partial delivery modelMore than 50% of back and middle office processes can by now be performed – and are being performed - in shared services or operating centers organizations often very far from the business owners. This is a steadily increasing trend, and the average weighted distance (#FTEs X distance) between those stakeholders is increasing…it is 1000s of miles now
Read the slide Impact of scale and process optimization are well documentedExample of transactional, administrative function*
This charts shows the structure of the cost of three types of typical operations. Direct FTE costs (of which the actual production worker is only a part) is the most important – but infra, IT and G&A are relevant too. All of them are impacted by the GBS construct, and all of them, as we may see in a second, are impacted by the business process technologies that shrink, so to speak, distance
This is not just an efficiency game. Some of the key levers of GBS – namely process optimization, scale, and cost arbitrage can impact those practices that are most correlated with business outcomes. In this example…READ SLIDE TECH
What does this mean to (a) rule based transaction support – e.g. order-to-cash or procure to pay (b) judgment based work e.g. strategic sourcing or continuous transaction monitoring or excess payment supplier recovery (c) analytics support – be it FP&A to predict the cost of good sold in presence of fluctuation of raw materials, or inventory optimization, or equipment service contracts optimization?Phil – what do you think
But leadership should be attracted to the fact that global operations will increase in strategic value and impact, due to the improved business practices, technology, and non-incremental transformation needs generated by the labor imbalances. In fact, the strategic operations around what is allocated to which functional entity in a shared service based architecture is the crux of many of our clients’ journeys at this point. While many already have some sort of shared service of operating centers, most of them are continuin in the journey of extension and refinement of those structures. While the guiding principles will stay the same – The allocation of work will change over time due the abilty to collaborate more richly between the related organizations, and will favor the allocation of work on the basis of the economic advantage of scale, process optimization and available skills, and cost arbitrage…and less so because of the constraints of communication
Until not long ago, the only choice for operations processes was to rely on ERPs, related or additional workflows, and face to face interaction and so called snickerware…Given the advances in business processes and technology, we must move on to further improve efficiency and effectiveness of the work that doesn’t fully fit into those paradigms…and this is done, in my opinion, through the introduction of much more significant collaboration – not just communication – environmentsWhat is a unified collaboration environment?
…giving them the ability to do so, even in the new conditionsHumans can learn things, but we cannot unlearn instincts, that is why apple is good...it follows the instinct of touch, see, enables immediate gratification and interaction with peopleVisual contact and presence...who's around me? How's the team Doing...peer pressure, sense of flow – a very well known pattern in organizational behavior and psychology ...people are less stressed and perform better if they feel they're together There is also a need for immediacy of available people-related info...how are things going, how are people performing, where's my personalized leaderboard – can it feel more like a game, even?contact must be rich, immediate...speed of voice lag – that is so annoying in conference calls, ability to draw something, look at the same thingAnd if im manager can I do it on the move?[CLICK] We believe that technology and business practices now allow to use all this for operations work…read slide
We have gotten to the limit of the exercise, stretched old ways of running operations to where they could possibly go…but we still struggle with the fragmentation of the front lines, the requirements of the law, the volatility of the business and market needs…[CLICK twice] We must embrace business process design that uses the best practices in human resources to harness global talent, with a stronger, more creative technology component and a clear, scientific view of how business processes are run globallyWe believe we can help, and we would like to open a discussion with you on this fascinating, yet very practical topic, today itself