Some companies are celebrating their SSO’s 21st birthday. Get the photos out! Aw, there it is in diapers, and as a disruptive 5-year-old, a pimply teenager being experimental, and ooh – recent pics of it all serious and grown up!
We are now at a stage where most:
• Large enterprises that have $1 billion turnover or more have shared services;
• Companies with shared services, have had their SSO for more than 5 years;
• SSOs say they are mature, although this is really more reflective of their years on the planet, than their organizational state.
Most SSOs that are more than 5 years in have checked a few boxes – by now, they have:
• Proven the SSO concept
• Won over most of their stakeholders
• Centralized, and by doing so have delivered whopping savings
• Consolidated a good number of ERPs down to a handful, or perhaps even one
Most SSOs that have 5 years’ experience or more in the bag, have undoubtedly delivered significant savings. This is mainly because shared services greatest savings arguably come ‘upfront’. To use an astronomy metaphor, Jupiter-size savings are realized in the first wave of shared services, and then what tends to follow with most SSO journeys are the little planets, like Mercury or Venus. This is great from a business case perspective, but it sets an expectation, and leaves the business wanting more.
Being at this post-Jupiter stage presents us with some plus points (we’ve proven a few things, and don’t have to prepare ourselves for major resistance every day like we used to, and most people in the company don’t hate us), but it does indeed present us with a new array of issues – mainly we are trying to answer “where is the next big win going to come from?” Is there another major planet actually ‘out there’, or will our victories stay small forever, as we roll out standardization and system consolidation?
The challenge now is how can shared services leaders manage their SSOs so they can operate and deliver at an exceptional level – not just good – and deliver savings or wins that remind the business of the results that came from centralization?
There’s an event in March – the Shared Services Leaders’ Summit, that examines four paths that can lead us to impressive financial results, perhaps similar to the Jupiter experience of old, and take service delivery up several notches. Let’s take a quick look at them:
Talent:
A few developments are stress-testing the way we hire. Firstly, we recognize that as an industry, repetitive, menial work can be automated or roboticized. This makes us think differently about what activities and outcomes our people should be focusing on. Our vision is to ‘move up the value chain’, and upskill our teams, so we can offer a more consultative, judgement-based service. This means we need to train our existing teams, or we need to change the people we employ.
Secondly, the profile of the employee under 30 is radically different from 10 years ago, and light years away from what it was in the mid 90s. Millennials stress-test our recruitment and development processes because they have different goals, expectations, values and drivers. In addition, Millennials are expert in UX – the user-experience. Enterprise technologies that Generation X and Baby Boomers have lived with would not pass muster with Millennials, and rightly so. Millennials’ fresh yet highly innate technology perspective will inspire an acceleration in technology adoption in the next 5 years.
By focusing on your SSO’s Talent Program you’ll be setting your SSO apart from the competition (other SSOs, or the business itself). It’s time to see shared services as a career step for all generations of employees. Embracing this as an approach will have a huge impact on your savings.
Innovation:
Ahhh – the ‘I’ word. This word has been thrown around by BPOs and SSOs for years. But after scratching the surface, there wasn’t a lot underneath.
Technology is changing this. And if you haven’t figured this out yet, it’s time to switch a gear and catch up. The most pivotal technologies now are RPA, Machine Learning and predictive analytics.
These technologies give us powers that are unfathomable – powers to identify root causes quickly, powers to make reliable predictions about the likelihood of events, powers to scale and respond with master agility.
Some useful questions to ask yourself are: Do you have an owner of innovation today? How is innovation decided on in your company? Is innovation welcomed or blocked? What is IT’s role in innovation?
To be truly innovative is to challenge existing processes and even existing goals, and build the tools and environment around you that can transport your company to the best version of itself it can be. Think Apple and the iPhone, think Dyson, UBER, Google and Microsoft. These companies go through ‘phases’ of innovation, or run innovation as a constant, which keeps them, unquestionably, at the sharp edge of user experience, value creation, market development (and indeed market-making) and competitiveness.
Continuous improvement:
At the center of Continuous Improvement sits the question ‘why?’ When faced with a situation you’re not convinced by, you sometimes have to ask why through 6 or 7 rounds before you get to the heart of the reason something is actually done the way it is.
CI can be exhausting! So the trick with CI is to lower resistance to it in the business, which reduces the exhaustion levels. This relies on the wider business adopting a CI mindset, so it’s ready to receive improvement. It’s hard on a CI team if it’s working in a stagnant, immovable culture. Often, this kind of culture is enough to kill CI.
If CI is embraced at an executive level, the results can be jaw-dropping – and not only in shared services. You may be limited in your ability to effect CI adoption at a corporate leadership level, but you can affect it at a shared services leadership level.
It’s great to have a CI program, but initiatives need to be absorbed by a shared services organization that is ready to receive, and is indeed clicked into the CI cycle of providing feedback. This is the difference between having a CI perspective and program and having a CI culture.
Customer Satisfaction:
Sales is such a massive part of any shared services leader’s role. This would be fine if we didn’t all have such a low opinion of selling. When people say we need to ‘sell’, an array of activities and values come to mind, and most have a hint of aggression or pushy-ness.
Perhaps you are wondering why we are talking about selling when we should be talking about customer satisfaction? Because the two things are so tightly interlinked.
To understand the customer completely, you need amazing sales skills. These include an ability to ask the right questions. “Mr./Ms. Customer…
1. How would you describe the way things are today?
2. What does the ideal future look like?
3. What are the main issues blocking your path to that goal?
4. What are the consequences of not dealing with these issues?
5. How does this translate into cost, and wider damage?
6. Based on the above, what are your top 5 needs for the next 12 months?
7. Within these needs, what are your requirements?”
And so the questions go on…
Once you have really heard your customer, you are in an excellent position to satisfy them. Often shared services organizations try to satisfy their customers without knowing the answers to the above questions. Not knowing this information will almost always skew your aim off-target.
Set up a framework where these questions become so natural to you. Importantly, these questions require regular (documented!) updates, and the answers need to drive your SSO’s strategy.
Simply put, asking your internal customer these questions should be the first thing a shared services leader does. Strategy, goals, metrics, etc. all cascade down from the answers to these questions.
In summary…
As you can see, these 4 paths are highly connected: feedback from customers will determine what your talent priorities looks like; innovative tools like machine learning will help you decide what continuous improvement programs to work on, etc. Make the next 12 months the year you devote to these 4 paths, and you may find you’ve located that ‘out there’ planet that eclipses your Jupiter savings.
Join us from March 7th – 9th in London for our Shared Services Leaders’ Summit: http://sharedserviceslink.com/conference/european-shared-services-leaders-summit
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