INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR. SUMIT MATHUR,
Director Global Finance Shared Services, India, Mexico and China
Carestream Health Inc.
How do you believe shared services of the future will look like? What will they deliver beyond providing a fixed portfolio of scale services?
Shared services organizations can add greater value to businesses by using upgraded technologies and advanced skillsets.
By incorporating automation, virtualization, advanced analytics, and other digital technologies into the operations, shared-services organizations would be able to streamline processes and focus resources on additional activities in the business value chain. The
technologies also may enable them to make better and faster decisions and improve the quality of internal and external customer interactions.
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?
The mature shared services or the Global business service models will continue to focus on:
- Do only what drives value- focus on business outcomes- value driven for internal and external stakeholders.
- Do it well- focus on operational efficiency- continuous improvements and strong service delivery management.
- Be agile- business landscape changes will need a flexible mix of captive vs outsourced, near-shore vs off-shore delivery, and range of scope-of-work as new opportunities and threats may arise.
How do you believe digital has enabled shared service organizations to deliver improved business impact? Could you please detail with some examples?
Technology has allowed multiple aspects of shared service delivery to be done on a pro-active basis instead of being reactive.Some examples from the finance industry are:
- Multi-national banks spent large resources of their back offices for risk monitoring. The automation with advanced analytics now monitors live transactions in banking systems and no longer engages humans to identify these risk flags, rather they now focus on humans to support in making further decisions thereby enhancing significant business value and scope of services.
- RPA is used in F&A products for exception handling. If an outcome exceeds a threshold, RPA software can determine if the exception warrants a remediation workflow. If it does, RPA will start the workflow automatically. This can happen in a fraction of a second, rather than the minutes or hour it might take with human intervention.
How do people within shared services need to be reskilled to get ready for the future? What should enterprises be doing about it?
Core competencies for shared services will continue to evolve further as businesses adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning further to provide its goods & services to meet customer needs.
The shared service organizations will need to deploy a mixed strategy, we need to hire domain experts to enable technology adoption, but also parallelly make digital technology a part of our onboarding and continued learning & development programs to better enable all
team members.
Can you please detail some key innovation initiatives within the Carestream India Shared service organization? What kind of business impact has this delivered?
Carestream adopts continuous innovation and operational excellence in every aspect of the organisation. The shared services team supports business in making the data-driven decisions quickly.
During the digital transformation journey in our shared services, we undertook process engineering to make processes simple and lean, making them agile to meet an ever changing business environment, and the information systems are being made more efficient with enhanced use of digital technology including robot-assisted processing.