INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR MANISH GUPTA,
Head of Compensation & Benefits at SKF India Ltd.
How do you believe shared services of the future will look like? What will they deliver beyond providing a fixed portfolio of scale services?
The Shared Service industry has come a long way since they evolved around 1980. The intention of creating these organizations was to have a department that can centrally manage the high transaction/volume, low skilled work, provide process efficiency and cost arbitrage by moving the work from a high labor cost country to a low-cost country.
The new age Shared Service organizations are now capable of handling a highly-skilled role, have robust platforms, uses AI and ML, RPAs and provide a strategic edge to organizations.
I believe the future of SSCs are exciting as they pave the path of digitalizing the complete operations and will take on few of the specialized roles such as payroll, compliances within single countries, talent management administrative tasks, global mobility where the host country HR is just coordinating for visa, accommodation, etc, and HR/finance technology implementations to list few. The possibilities are endless, but the organizations should do a cost-benefit analysis and feasibility study before taking a final step in including them.
What are shared service organizations doing to deliver game-changing performance from their shared services? Is there any change in terms of preparedness that you’re seeing now versus say five years back?
As I said earlier, the SSOs are using the technologies to change the game. The earlier thought of having them as cost arbitrage no longer exists and the companies are providing training and making them enabled with RPAs, ML and AI to reduce the efforts on transactions and use their time in value-adding services to the companies. Many of the SSOs have deployed chatbots who constantly monitor the feedback of the deliveries and act as Tier 0 support (Self-service).
SSOs are also stepping up to provide world-class consumer-grade experience and digital evolution. They are now transpiring into a knowledge hub that requires a lot of forward-looking. With the span of time, the SSOs are moving from transactional-based processes to more knowledge-intensive processes. This will certainly help them to create the “Aha” moments.
And not the last, the magic happens, when the human touch is maintained. The technology is important but we should not forget that we are human and human loves talking, personalized discussions and now since technology is helping us to save time on transactions, we should invest this time in talking to people. Pick up some of the important queries coming on the ticketing tool, emails and rather responding to them, call them, understand the issue, wish them on call on becoming parents instead of just updating their maternity/paternity leaves from backend, send them a flower bouquet, congratulate the family members when employee gets promoted. This will shape the SSOs in Human organizations instead of only perceived as Transaction processing hubs.
How do you believe digital has enabled shared service organizations to deliver improved business impact? Could you please detail with some examples?
It is no brainer that technology is an enabler in the success of the SSOs. Usage of robotic process automation (RPA) specifically has helped many organizations in reducing the processing time and thus creating a good experience of relevant stakeholders.
Learning from one of the organizations (Telecom), we had used excel based automation tools, in reducing the manual calculations for incentive payout and had saved many man-hours which help yield savings for the company.
Other examples of using the RPA are:
- Doing form entries in provident fund sites to generate UANs
- Using excel macros to split and send files by function, department, grades, etc. It is still the most daunting task to do manually. Isn’t it?
- Use VBA based macro to check the replies in particular folders under outlook.
- Resume screening and parsing through AI.
The SSOs now have stronger analytical capability using these tools and can predict the potential attritions, disengagement, low performance and even predict the insights by combining multiple data.
How do people within shared services need to be reskilled to get ready for the future? What should enterprises be doing about it?
Tech savviness is an important area where I think the employees need to be trained to make them ready for what is coming. This is the area where there is constant change. Things that exist today, may not exist in the same shape or form tomorrow. So we need to constantly align ourselves with the changing business and technology dynamics.
Enterprises need to have a vision for the future. We will need to be upskilled often to be relevant for the coming context. Following skills are very essential for being future-ready:
- Tech savviness
- Business and financial acumen
- Eye for details
- Stronger governance measures
- Analytical capability
- Lean and six sigma
Can you please detail some key innovation initiatives within SKF’s Global Shared service organization? What kind of business impact has this delivered?
SKF has multiple nearshore/ in-country SSOs and it is difficult to streamline the processes in such a structure. Also, earlier the biggest issue was to not have a clear work matrix. Around 2 years back, we did a process and accountability mapping to draw out the linear responsibilities and followed them with a governance matrix. This helped in mapping expectations and draw out a clear process maps for the different teams. This also helped in faster resolution and better employee satisfaction.
We also experimented with XMatrix to draw out a 3-year vision for SSOs and deploy the strategy. The results off the same will start coming from 2021 onwards however as we speak, the actions have started!!