The idea of corporate Shared Services (SS) has existed a lengthy time, using the private sector credited with beginning this idea within the late 1980’s, and also the public sector in regards to a decade later. Personally, and never attempting to date myself, I stumbled upon e-commerce model in a former employer around 2005. To put it simply, SS is definitely an operating model that allows function-specific sources (i.e., HR, IT, Finance, etc.) to become leveraged across a whole organization, leading to lower costs with agreed-upon customer-service levels. It’s utilization by the public and private sector increased consistently with time, after which came the 2008/2009 recession. In those days, companies preferred increased efficiency, wider geographic achieve, and broader scope coverage from the SS, to deal with greater regulatory scrutiny for the similar or perhaps lower costs! These demands caused some inflection point, and subsequently stage in SS maturity began establishing itself… Global Business Services (GBS). So, what’s GBS?
Definition
GBS is definitely an operating model defined slightly differently based on recognise the business or consultant you consult with, but they’ll all agree with the requirement for these five elements:
1) Multi-Functional – spans multiple functions, companies, and locations across a typical service delivery framework.
2) Operational Efficiency – offers greater financial savings, efficiency and compliance when compared with traditional SS.
3) Finish-to-Finish View – enables an finish-to-finish process view (i.e., Order-to-Cash) while driving significant finish-to-finish process enhancements.
4) Service Delivery Excellence – focuses more about service delivery excellence, agility, scalability and innovation.
5) Client-Focused and Aligned – seeks to aid business outcomes and delivers innovative abilities to assist companies outshine competitors.
This sounds impressive, however the model clearly takes a little bit of try to implement, with overall strategy and governance requiring to become addressed and decided to by all stakeholders up-front. If strategy and governance aren’t decided to upfront, the transformation may move ahead as well as continue for a while, and can be vulnerable to falling lacking achieving objectives or perhaps be an outright failure.
Impressive adoption… but has got the value been fully achieved yet?
Nevertheless, like a business design GBS is not going anywhere soon. The Hackett Group continues to be reporting in excess of ten years the proportion of SS that has progressed to a GBS model. Since 2014, GBS organizations have outnumbered single-function SS organizations with a factor of three. Additionally, in Deloitte’s 2015 Global Shared Services survey, roughly 60% from the 1,000 SS reporting were multi-function anyway, that contains several functions. Although the GBS adoption has ongoing to develop, not every the implementations have delivered the expected business value and outcomes. Ought to be fact, couple of companies (under 10-15%) have arrived at the “ultimate goal” of GBS performance yet, aside from the likes of P&G and Unilever, who’ve been in internet marketing for more than ten years. So, as the company transitions from SS to GBS, are you currently delivering the expected value and outcomes for your business clients, and when not, where’s your organization with that journey?
If you’re not sure, stay tuned in in my next article on “Taking Your GBS one stage further.”
