Becoming a digital front runner

Digital is the new standard

Recent events have accelerated the pace of digital transformation with nearly all organisations experiencing a shock therapy of sudden remote working, online collaboration and the rapid adoption of new tools. Global Business Services (GBS) centres were already in a relatively favourable position, designed from the start to serve customers remotely. However, that isn’t enough to make them digital leaders. Below are a few suggestions to help put your GBS centre at the forefront of digital transformation.

Prioritise your initiatives

Digital transformation is a very broad term. It encompasses various initiatives aimed at improving efficiency, reducing costs, adding value and enhancing delivery capabilities. Finance leaders need to strike a balance between these initiatives to avoid disrupting their operations and burning out the organisation by trying to do everything at once.

Finance organisations tend to focus most on cost reduction with digital initiatives, such as robotic process automation, or standardisation initiatives, such as implementing a single-instance ERP. Initiatives to improve quality and speed, such as self-service capabilities and analytics suites, are less common but, arguably, equally important. Low quality service is the most common reason for organisations to resort to backshoring operations.

Some Finance leaders prefer to focus primarily on low-hanging fruit and quick wins with their digital initiatives. While it is useful to demonstrate benefits early to gain support for digitalisation, developing a strong base of capabilities is vital for long-term success. The capabilities required might be skill-related, such as business analysis and UX design, or tech-related, such as adopting cloud infrastructure and services.

Building a solid pipeline of potential digitalisation initiatives, a long-term view, as well as a robust prioritisation approach are all necessary to formulate the right focus for your organisation.

Get the right tools

Building or expanding a GBS organisation is a worthwhile but demanding task. It requires significant investment and time commitment, with a large proportion of the costs stemming from expenses related to knowledge transfer, such as travel and parallel run. Today, organisations can accelerate this process and simultaneously improve its quality by employing the latest tools and technologies. One example is automated creation of knowledge transfer documentation, which later can even be used as a basis for process automation.

Thanks to the rapid development of process mining and automation tools, companies are also able to discover processes suitable for automation more quickly. With industry-leading providers such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Trufa or Blue Prism, you can capture the workflow, design the automation, and deliver it to create fully digital operations that can scale as the underlying business grows.

Get the right talent

To succeed with digital transformation you will need the right talent and skills in place. The candidate profile needed by GBS centres is now different. Career paths and training curriculums also need to be adjusted to attract and retain digital specialists.

The hiring process for GBS Finance centres was traditionally focused on candidates with relevant process and functional skills, such as accounting proficiency or knowledge of ERP tools. This is not sufficient now. In addition to core tech skills, such as programming and data analysis, digital enabling skills are needed, such as business analysis, UX design, agile project and product management.

An ideal candidate has both the traditional functional skills and new digital ones. In practice, however, it’s hard to find those profiles. Therefore, it is vital that learning and development programmes focus on building these skills in-house.

Another aspect to consider is the career path. In a typical path for a GBS employee, they can rise from analyst to team lead, and even to process lead. This will not work for digital transformation experts. Their roles are more project-based and require highly specialised skills. Their career advancement would not necessarily involve people management, but rather responsibility for larger initiatives or products.

Optimise your locations

Even the most digitalised GBS hubs still need physical premises as a place for collaboration, training and continuous improvement. A typical GBS set-up in recent years was to centralise in a few locations around the world, either with one global hub, or a few regional ones. This has created massive competition for talent in the most popular locations, such as Krakow for European hubs or Bangalore for Asian hubs, with a negative impact on the economics of these hubs as labour costs exceed the original assumptions and high staff turnover impacts operations.

But recent trends in flexible and remote working have enabled GBS hubs to source talent from locations all over the country in which they are located. This has wide benefits. Not only are office costs reduced but the talent base becomes broader, as it includes people who would not normally consider relocation to the city where the hub was located.

Instead of a single large office in one city, you could consider splitting up the hub to multiple smaller locations, serving as bases for onboarding, training and knowledge-sharing, while maintaining a flexible work pattern.

However, while remote working in theory enables a location-agnostic, global set-up, in practice we would recommend limiting the number of countries where GBS hubs are located. Contract, tax and labour law complexities need to be dealt with in each additional location. You should therefore consider limiting additional locations to either countries where you already have a business presence or to typical offshoring destinations, where GBS practices are well established.

Lead the transformation

While all the above aspects are undoubtedly important considerations in any digital transformation, the list is not exhaustive as ultimately success depends on a multitude of factors. A clear vision, appropriate governance and inspiring leadership are also crucial to transforming your GBS Finance organisation.

We hope this short article has triggered ideas for your GBS centre. Do not hesitate to contact us. We would be pleased to continue the conversation.

Authors

David Reiner
Senior Manager, Finance & Performance

David is a Senior Manager in Deloitte’s Finance Transformation team with 10+ years’ experience, helping clients to prepare for the future of Finance, using technology to automate, and make better decisions. David has led complex Finance business transformations with a strong emphasis on Finance strategy, end-to-end solution & process design and the implementation of digital Finance.

Jan Jemiolo
Manager, Finance & Performance

Jan is a Manager in Deloitte’s Finance Transformation team with 7 years of consulting experience, focused on helping clients execute complex Finance transformation and digitisation projects. Jan has supported multi-national clients in establishing Finance CoEs, designing operating models, standardising and digitising processes. He has deep expertise in programme management, including defining business cases and tracking programme benefits.