6 Ways GBS Can Create Sustainable Value

Global Business Services are now a Strategic Imperative for organizations wishing to remain competitive in their fields. They are typically the vanguard, and in many cases; the harbingers of transformational change in the company, and as the corporate landscape evolves around us and GBS’ place and importance within it, I want to share below 6 ways in which GBS can create sustainable value for their organizations:

Digitization

GBS is where the processes that render themselves to Digitization reside. It is here that we can deploy Artificial Intelligence, GenAI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Robotic Process Automation, etc.

Digitization can be approached in 2 ways:

1. Strategic Digitization: At the superstructure level of the function, through Platform play deploying the most modernized and relevant AI-embedded platform that drives up throughput and performance across the entire end-to-end process chain while simultaneously driving harmonization, standardization, and error reduction benefits that come with it.

2. Specific Digitization: Deployed typically at the process-specific levels within the functions, this is where the most impactful, and in many cases, game-changing; use cases for deployments of GenAI, ML, NLP, and RPA can be found.      

Insights and Intelligence

Many corporates tend to be in a state of “Data, Data everywhere, and not an Insight to share!” By their very nature, GBS are data-rich and can help their companies in harvesting this data to generate actionable intelligence and insights. This can be done through Data-mining for Business Intelligence, or creating a Data Strategy function for the Organization residing within the GBS and leveraging the four Data Strategy pillars of Data Sourcing and Integration, Master Data Management, Data Quality, and Data Governance to create unique differentiators and competitive advantages for their firm.

For example, with such a Data Strategy function, a major automobile manufacturer created a Vehicle Repository which gave them insight into the manufacturing cost of each and every vehicle down to the exact VIN, and allowed leadership to make the most appropriate market allocation decisions to drive profitability along with revenue.  

Business Impact / Business Value Add

GBS can move from its usual cost-focused role and become an important revenue-enabler for the organization, this is how GBS leaves the back-benches and takes its rightful place at the Top Table of the company. With its process excellence capability so well-honed in its traditional process domains, GBS can come out from the confines of SG&A back-end processes and deploy the same skills not just at the middle-office level, but in fact at the backend of the front-office to make a meaningful difference. 

For example: 

• A banking GBS enhanced the Credit Card Fraud detection algorithm for the bank, resulting in improved fraud prevention which reduced fraud provisioning and unlocked several hundred million dollars of additional ‘float’ money which the bank could lend and make revenue from.
• A healthcare GBS worked to streamline, reduce, automate, and offshore the administrative tasks of the company’s hospital and clinical front offices, thus freeing up doctors and nurses to be able to see more patients and generate more revenue.

Operational Risk Reduction

Especially in Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Governance processes, GBS as the central repository governing all of these can play a major role in reducing Operational Risk. This is done by mapping Key Risk Areas, Key Control Parameters, Key Control Indicators; and Risk Priority Numbers i.e. combination of the Severity of a failure, Probability of Occurrence, and Probability of Detection can also be determined. Mitigants to monitor and reduce these be embedded into the Process Architecture to make it risk-free and compliant. This is especially of immense value in heavily regulated industries such as Banking and Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Pharmaceuticals etc.

Customer and Employee Experience Enhancement

In GBS having either Customer or Employee-facing mandates, stickiness and value can be created through driving Customer and Employee Delight - This can be done by streamlining customer / employee-facing processes to be less cumbersome and easier to navigate without having to make contact in the first place (remember, every customer or employee call into a contact center is basically a defect!); and by driving of self-service and automation. The advent of Generative AI is especially likely to have a sea-change impact on this and is an indispensable lever to get ahead of to establish GBS’ primacy in this area.

Productivity and Efficiency, thus Cost

The advantages of consolidation and co-location give GBS a unique position to drive streamlining, cross-training, and cross-utilization; unlocking significant synergies in terms of both economies of scale and standardization. This allows for the driving of productivity and efficiency; and added to these ‘natural’ size, scale, and process synergies are now the automation and digitization muscle to drive out cost. GBS are the preferred area where the latest digital tools for enabling this can be deployed and implemented.

I deliberately kept the Productivity, Efficiency, and Cost way of value addition at the end because that is the Traditional Wheelhouse of GBS and almost all GBS have become very good at this, but while this is the most necessary value driver – indeed, in many cases it is the raison d’etre for GBS – it is no longer sufficient and a careful selective cultivation among a combination of the above 6 ways is required as GBS goes up the Value Curve.