Global Business Services

What is Global Business Services?

Global business services (GBS) is a term for centralized service delivery models that encompass shared services (captives), outsourcing, and centers of excellence (COEs) to serve multiple business units. Scope can include finance, IT, HR, and procurement, as well as other functions, and can be delivered onshore or offshore.

Transforming experiences with Global Business Services

Deloitte’s Global Business Services practice works closely with senior executives to understand their strategic vision and assess how GBS might align with their business strategy to drive results. We advise our clients from initial strategy development, through the implementation and launch of Global Business Services, to refinements of the GBS model over time to help unlock the next frontier of growth.

• For mature companies with shared services and outsourcing, we work to bring order to existing contracts, practices, and processes. We help find the next opportunity for incremental value, managing exposure to global locations and service providers, and improving internal and external controls.
  
• For businesses with limited experience, who may have a single function utilizing shared services or outsourcing, we help capitalize on progress made and leverage lessons learned to drive value across other areas of their global enterprise.
  

While the specific path and the number of steps to unlock the next frontier of growth differs for every organization, the overarching questions companies should start with are the same: where are we today, how do we compare to leading practices and market direction, and what should we look like one year from now? Five years from now?

You have to start somewhere…

Distilling hundreds of leading practices learned through countless shared services and G&A transformations across industries, we are helping clients answer questions about their maturity and potential roadmap through our proprietary GBS of the Future Diagnostic Tool and immersive GBS of the Future Lab. We take a holistic approach by analyzing 20+ characteristics across four key dimensions of a GBS organization: Strategy, Service Management, Organization, and Operations & Technology.

What’s the role of ‘digital’ within Global Business Services?

Digital is an essential, underlying part of the conversation in defining where the future of GBS lies, but we believe that digital is not a separate “thing,” tool, or technology…it’s a fundamentally different way of operating. Digital capabilities underpin our view of the GBS maturity journey to drive ultimate value by balancing costs and growth. When human intelligence and breadth/depth of industry experience meets digital strategy and execution, companies can unlock the next frontier of growth through global business services.

Potential benefits of Global Business Services models

• Improved alignment with the business strategy, digital strategy, and growth agenda
  
• A global approach that can improve visibility, control, and risk management
  
• Scale to drive cost and operational efficiencies on a global level across functions and business units
  
• Benefits from one integrated organization with end-to-end processes and clear accountability
• Improved analytics and insights from access to cross-functional, enterprise-wide data
• Becomes incubator for digital ways of working and catalyst for broader, enterprise-wide digital transformation
• An agile organization with flexible scalability to respond to changing business needs such as mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures
• Becomes a source of talent / workforce needed for the future
  

Here’s how one organization brought global business services to life

When Amgen Inc. opened its Amgen Capability Center (ACC) in October 2017 in Tampa, ambitions for its contributions to the company’s future were high—and they have only gotten higher. On the surface, the move to centralize key functional services, including finance, IT, and employee services, might seem to be a fairly conventional shared services strategy. But Amgen’s multiyear plan for the ACC extends beyond the typical shared services center.

Check out this article in which David Meline, executive vice president and CFO, and Judy Brown, senior vice president, Global Business Solutions and Finance, discuss the rationale for creating the ACC, the roles it serves, and why culture is such an important component of its ultimate effectiveness.