Good Practices in Scaling Your GBS Organization in 2022

Enterprises are now shifting from managing disruptions to looking ahead to a new future with plans for innovation and growth. Global business services (GBS) play a central role in the organization with its 360-degree view across the business, both internally and externally. The next generation of GBS is moving beyond the traditional role of providing transactional services and reducing costs. They are leveraging process management and digital transformation expertise to become an in-house process improvement advisor, driving decision-making and delivering revenue growth. Here are some of the good practices in scaling GBS enterprises.

End-to-end process management: Adopting end-to-end process ownership can help enterprises move on from siloed functions to achieve greater visibility across multiple lines of business (LOB) and geographies. Shared services standardization however needs to be reexamined when tackling customer-facing processes to achieve a healthy balance of global and local processes, and optimize business value, and customer experience. According to a recent survey, 62% of the order-to-cash GBS have end-to-end process ownership, compared to 32% of shared services. The advantage of embracing an end-to-end process management approach will benefit digitalization and process standardization, and customer experiences.

Innovation with exponential technologies: Digital technologies are transforming all business functions from SCM and HR to Finance and customer experience, and more. While Robotic Process Automation reduces costs by automating routine, manual tasks, cloud-based IT environments enable end-to-end integration of operations, Artificial intelligence tools help manage customer experience and control supplier management to create improved and efficient service. Digital transformation is essential in the journey to next-generation GBS enterprises and according to a recent global survey, around 90 percent of global shared service organizations are at some stage of their journey towards implementing Intelligent Automation.

Augmenting human intelligence with high degrees of automation and insights from AI allows GBS to shift focus to added-value services and reenergizes the workforce culture.

• Automate transactional processing: redesign end-to-end processes with digital technologies for zero-touch, low-cost processes
• Continuous Improvement: use process-mining technologies to visualize a process end to end and identify and resolve efficiency bottlenecks
• Enable global collaboration: bridge physical distance with cloud technologies and collaboration tools to connect the business internally and externally and encourage knowledge sharing.

GBS has always focused on delivering cheaper, faster, and better services to the enterprises they serve. However, while cost-efficiency continues to be an important strategic imperative, there is more pressure than ever for GBSs to digitally transform the operations they are charged with, and create new services and business value, not just cut costs.

GBS stands to benefit immensely from RPA as it improves efficiency, reduces costs and increases ROI. This allows organizations to shift their workforce to higher-value tasks, as RPA takes care of low-value repetitive tasks.

Most SSCs and GBS are still in the early phases of shared services automation, primarily using unattended robots, with little to no functionality or intelligence, to improve several back-office tasks. However, as RPA has increased its capabilities – through embedded and Artificial Intelligence, SSCs would be able to perform more cognitive-heavy tasks automatically while keeping human employees in the loop.

To remove bottlenecks and automate optimization, enterprises must embrace digital transformation. Enterprises need to find ways to break down information silos and allow the free flow of information. Digital tools offer a solution to this problem. Digital tools also help the workforce, by freeing them of repetitive, mundane tasks that plague their overall productivity and help them engage in value-added tasks. Process mining tools help in analyzing event logs and other available data to build up a graphic representation of your workflows, which assists in locating process bottlenecks and highlighting duplicated areas of work.

Some of the key capabilities of a process mining tool are:

• KPIs monitoring in real-time.
• Predictive Analysis
• Process Standardization
• Visualization of how processes contribute to business outcomes.

Process mining, therefore, acts as the keystone to enterprise digital transformation initiatives. It provides important information needed to make sound business decisions. Through process mining tools, enterprises can visualize the impact on businesses when they run through the scenarios of changing the process. Enterprises subsequently can make improvements in their existing processes and know what returns to expect from their investments. Process mining tools should be the foundation upon which all future investment and transformation projects should be based.

AI will increasingly be adopted by enterprises worldwide for business transformation with newer capabilities of AI already being used by some organizations like facial recognition and natural language processing (NLP). For global business services organizations, AI can mean automation beyond RPA. Using cognitive AI and analytics, organizations can use unstructured data and handle complex marketing, finance, accounting, and customer service processes with automation.

Breaking functional silos, unified governance and digital transformation are some of the trends powering the future of shared services. These factors will help businesses to improve the experience for their internal stakeholders as well as customers. Shared services should therefore look to increase their responsiveness to growth and take advantage of future business models.

Data-driven decision making: GBS is a gold mine of data and GBS organizations can leverage predictive analytics using data from multiple departments and perform cross-functional analytics that can deliver unique operational insights. In a recent global survey, 61% of respondents said that the data analytics in their organizations was still ‘basic’, while 27% said they had sufficiently competent analytics. Only 8% had capabilities for complex event processing and neural networks. Enterprises today are increasingly looking towards predictive analytics to manage uncertainties and make swift and sound decisions.

Incorporating Talent: Any digital transformation journey is only as successful as the people involved, therefore GBS enterprises focusing on enhancing their operations must prioritize talent. According to a recent survey, GBS organizations are increasingly focusing on developing a culture of innovation and analytics to support a widespread digital mindset.

GBS enterprises moving forward should continually review and evaluate their priorities and investments to ensure they are pursuing the best possible pathways for their business as there is no one-size-fits-all approach given the vast possibilities with digital and scaling up.