Key Takeaways from SSOW Autumn

SSOW Autumn 2022 is officially wrapped up! From Tuesday, September 20 to Friday, September 23 the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada was home to the SSON family and our attendees. During this exciting 3-day event hundreds of shared service professionals gathered to network, share insights, and hear from the top thought leaders in the shared services space. If you weren't able to attend the event, don't worry, SSON has compiled these key takeaways from each session of SSOW Autumn.

Day 1

SSON Opening Remarks

Host: Brad DeMent, Partner, Corporate and Shared Services, ScottMadden

The conference kicked off with an overview of SSON Analytics and took us through the journey of our event as well as the overview of the content for the next three days. He walked us through the current struggles of the C-Suite, and how Shared Services/GBS leaders can step up to the plate.

• CFOs are troubled by misdiagnosing the recession. This provides an opportunity for Shared Services and GBS leaders to find opportunities to perfect cash flow processes and promote cost savings at great value to these leaders.
• CTOs are interested in outpacing their competitor’s automation journeys as to not lose the competitive edge. Leaders were encouraged to therefore lean into AI and other technological tools that will satisfy these leaders.
• CHROs are struggling to refresh and retain skills in the workforce. Brad elaborated on how delegates and speakers will be brainstorming ways to solve problems arising from The Great Resignation.
• CIOs are on constant lookout to keep the company brand from being tarnished by cyber-attacks. How are GBS leaders securing their data and how we deal with compliance? 

Transformation Overload? Start with Digital Technology to Reinvent Customer Satisfaction

Moderator: Bastiaan de Goei, SVP Product, Instabase

Panelists: Richard Swan, Head of GBS, Koch Industries & Jim Hankins, Executive Director HR Shared Services, University of California, Davis

This panel of GBS/SSO Fortune 100 leaders uncovered how they are using digital transformation to outperform competitors in their respective spaces. This conversation included which process each decided to start with and why, how each pinpointed a vendor, as well as tackling change management issues around embracing new technologies.

• Start with clarity of vision. You constantly need to update your vision and challenge yourself on what is next. Engage your employee to participate in new ideas.
• “Put the customer first. Go out to fill a need, not back on a new technology. Companies that are successful know what they are doing, how they do it, why they are doing it, and how they are going to change the way we do it.”
• Both panelists emphasized the importance of proving value through a pilot and experiments. They will fail. However, you cannot punish those that fail but instead try to learn from them. It’s ok to only work with a few companies willing to experiment. Only work with the willing.
• Make sure all your constituents are aligned with your vision. Jim noted, “In federated environments, what you assume is a common interest may not be at all. Even though you’re the same company.”
• Panelists also discussed the creative ways companies can use their data to prove more value back to their business. For instance, Richard married internal and external data for HR to target certain hiring markets to retain and find talent.

Fireside Chat: From Employee One to 800 and Growing – Mastercard’s GBS 10-Year Journey

Moderator: Brad Dement, Partner, ScottMadden

Timothy Westendorf, EVP GBS, Mastercard

In this fireside chat, we heard from Mastercard’s GBS EVP as he talked candidly about his team’s journey 10 years in. The session highlighted how key milestones were achieved, lessons learned from stumbling blocks, and how his team is approaching the road to expansion.

• In order to create needed roles, from an organization perspective, you need to find people who not only want to do the work but also change the way you do it. Center your process around people and not technology.
• You will have turnover. You must relentlessly think about succession planning. Give employees a career path and new information to stay stimulated. When you feed well-trained employees back into the organization that also possesses its own value.
  “The sooner you invest in automation tools, RPA tools, you will see truly transformational change. But it’s only a tool. People drive change. Tech allows them to accomplish it.”
• “You can’t get far when you relieve yourself of responsibility of process when you outsource or hire a BPO. It must be an active relationship.”
• Tim emphasized creating a brand or a tagline around your GBS. It helped demonstrate the new and different to the team, to the businesses who saw them taking their jobs, helped create a unifying culture, and became a rallying cry that played out well. “When you’re 10 years in you need brains and culture”

Case Study: Lighting Up the Dark Side of the Moon

Fireside Chat Host: Samson David, CEO, Soroco

Wayne Butterfield, Partner, IQEQ

Nearly 70% of digital transformation initiatives in enterprises do not deliver the desired outcomes despite the best talent, solid investments, rigorous processes and strong KPIs. Why? Because they do not have visibility to the “dark side of the moon.” Soroco though its Scout graph technology helps light up this “dark side of the moon” for several enterprises.

• Organizations have visibility to how their systems work. Through structured interactions with systems of records, logs, and databases, they believe that if they know how the system works, they are ok. But they aren’t.
• What companies don’t know is how teams interact with their systems. People spent 60% or more of the workday outside of SOR interacting with systems. These interactions generate a dataset that is unstructured, undocumented, and massive.
  40% of RPA licenses are lying unused. In order to build a quality pipeline, you need to analyze how people interact with software.
• A study from the Harvard Business Review found that the average user of F500 companies spent 5 weeks a year just toggling between applications. This costs companies $5 million a year in “toggling tax.” Toggling happens because systems don’t talk to each other. Systems don’t talk to each other. Companies typically throw people at this problem to act as glue to connect data and context between applications.
• Wayne said, “We didn’t know what activities we were doing and how long it took – needed a tool to measure this. With this tool, we understood our work at a data level. Even in places I’ve never been to.”

SSON Research & Analytics Presents: The SSO/GBS State of the Industry H2 Trends

Naomi Secor, Global Managing Director, SSON

• Showcasing of the SSON North American Shared Service Center Map.
• Analyzing sourcing strategies from 10,000 SSCs in the SSON community.
• Most popular future models that organizations are looking to apply.
• Future services SSCs are looking to include within their framework to maintain competitiveness and reduce costs.

How to Supercharge Your Change Management Initiatives

Panelists: Viral Chhaya, Vice President – Enterprise Business services Strategy and Capabilities, Kaiser Permanente & Rakesh Virwar, Sr. Director – Controller and Shared Services Leader, Bloom Energy 

Change Management is often talked about as a soft topic however the soft topics are the hardest topics. This panel included a group of executives reflecting Finance, HR, & IT that worked through supercharged shared services technology implementations to learn how they bridge the communication gaps between teams to drive successful technology projects and deliver value back to the business over a period of 12 months.

• “There is no cookbook for change management. It’s situational but intentional”
  Change management must be a continuous process. If you are not constantly monitoring where you are, you will end up back where you started.
• Give unions a seat at the table. Partner with them to monitor how well initiatives are going. “Change should be something taken together, not imparted. Keep the process democratic”
• “To be able to ‘walk the talk’ … you have to align on the ‘talk’. Communication is key. In the absence of communication, rumor mills take over which make mountains out of molehills. The nightmares of the employee are worse than anything you can fathom.”
• Know the motivations of all the key players. Change management is not a spectator sport. You cannot understand the stream unless you immerse yourself in it.

Becoming the Tail that Wags the Dog: A Story of Change Management Shared Services

Geoffrey Zassenhaus, VP GBS, Novartis

Stakeholder management is often overlooked for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes it’s tagged as an afterthought, but without the proper foundations in place, its impact is negligible. So, if you got it all wrong now how do you fix it? This session focused on winning back your stakeholders for future success. We learned how to manage the changing role of stakeholders, how to promote effective communication skills for getting back on the right foot, and the tips and tricks to changing your outlook on stakeholder management.

• “We had to be courageous enough to raise conflicts within the business”
• Contract early with the customer. It is critical to write down the needs within a complex process. Set expectations of how you work and push hard early. It’s uncomfortable, but it's easier than backpedaling later.
• It is important to have well-facilitated conferences with the right amount of frequency. Geoffrey recommended daily 15min “stand up” meetings to ensure the needs of the customer were transparent, and the emotions of the team were in line with the work they were doing.
• Don’t go into the process with a “Julius Caesar” mindset. I came, I saw, I conquered. You need to drive change in the correct way, not by brute forcing it. Start with the customer, identify their needs, and work your way up.
• “Why bother with GBS if we don’t carry the vision of changing the whole enterprise?”

Day 2

How to Raise the bar on Customer Experience through Digital Transformation

Vince Cirel, CTO, Gannett

We learned from one GBS leader who oversees the day-to-day transactional support of thousands of customers in 58 countries. Vice spoke on how the businesses provided oversight into digital customer experience/self-service capabilities resulting in high customer ratings, streamlined processes, and ultimately raised sales based on one of its largest corporate accounts.

• Vince shared what he believes is the difference between Leadership and Management. Leadership is coping with change. Management is coping with complexity. Leadership is the network to promote ideas, too much and the work is too chaotic. Management is the hierarchy to maintain structure, too much and you’re unable to be agile.
• The following statistics were shared by the Boston Consulting Group:
  • Only 41% of companies have an enterprise-wide digital strategy.
  • Only 18% of companies rate their use of digital technology as “very effective”
  • The largest reasons for the 70% transformation failure rate are inadequate or immature change management practices and change resistance.
• Break your transformation journey down into three steps:
  • Fix budgets that are spent inefficiently. Optimize everything. Set a vision of where you need to be and build a framework to understand your clear goals.
  • Manage and sustain innovation. Get better or more creative with what you already do.
  • Lead breakthrough innovation. New products, services, or experiences often produce shifts in strategy, new customer behaviors, and entirely new markets.
• Allow your teams to fail and cover them for mistakes. It isn’t easy to implement the first time around.

The Journey to a World Class T&E Program: Automating Travel & Expenses Processes

Jorge Monge, Director of Global T&E Sales Incentives GBS, Smith & Nephew

Travel and Expense processes, while crucial for a company’s development and collaboration are often dreaded by most. Particularly when, after a successful business trip, you are faced with a small mountain of receipts, and it is time for filling your expenses. However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel: Expense reports creation, submission and approval do not have to be such a painful process. We learned how Smith and Nephew managed to reach world-class T&E satisfaction rating while saving 40K hours for its employees in over 38 countries around the world by embarking on a journey to world-class which embraces digitalization.

• Jorge walked us through how he used the pandemic downtime with T&E to shift to analytics and improving processes.
• “Do NOT assume customer needs. Two-way communication channels are crucial, one iteration is not enough. Customer satisfaction is an ongoing journey.”
• Implemented a customer satisfaction dashboard where 100% of negative feedback is analyzed and acted upon, causing a continuous feedback loop of improvement.
  The success of AI implementation at Smith & Nephew could not be overstated. They completely eliminated manager approval via AI audit. Managers are not experts in the manual process and AI taking over enhanced the accuracy from 75% to 98.5%. Jorge provided the managers full visibility to the data that was collected so they could still feel part of the process.
• With the expanse of AI technology, Smith & Nephew reduced 150min from expense reporting processes and returned 40,000 global man hours to employees.

The Evolution of Service Quality: How One GBS Team Redefined Quality Metrics Beyond SLAs

Barbara Dondarski, VP Service Excellence, Johnson & Johnson

Tony Verbeck, Senior Director, Service Improvement, Johnson & Johnson

When assessing service delivery, one measure of quality is often based on speed – how quickly your service is delivered. But is that still enough to keep your internal and external customers happy? This session provided insight from two J&J executives that lead the service excellence team as they shared how they measure quality and defined key KPIs and tactical tricks to help your SSO get there. 

• Use process mining to understand both your current and future state of your baseline processes and build out L&D.
• Quality isn’t about doing things fast; it must include doing them right. “High quality services” means services that are delivered completely, accurately and on time. This is a tricky maneuver when “Accurate and complete” can be different depending on your global location.
• It is imperative that you write down the specifications of services as most SLA processes are culturally known and passed down, but what do you do when these employees leave? Service specification is key. One service may end up being 5 services.
• All inaccuracies require rework. Internal investigations found that J&J’s SLA delivery was 98%, but only 60% of them were completely accurate. Do not sacrifice speed of delivery for quality.
• J&J can take the transactions on a case or business unit and run them through process mining. It’s a proxy measure for the true model, but within a few weeks, they can measure “Right first time” in thousands of cases (80% of volume).
• “It can be dangerous to use a proxy measure. Some people see how well the proxy measure is doing and want to improve that to get better. You must communicate that while it measures performance, it is only a stepping stone before you delve deeper.”

Achieving O2C Excellence – Cash is King, The Key to Building a World Class Cash Collecting Engine

MK Aydin, VP Enterprise Systems, Newscorp

In times of disruption, cash flow is essential. We learned from an O2C leader how they identified gaps in the O2C Process, automated and reduced collection time, effectively lowering cost per percentage, shortening collection times, and reducing errors. Next stop: quote-to-cash!

• MK advised using data and process mining to assess your current state. Then, start implementation with a smaller business unit and scale from there. Once complete, you can start implementation with a specifically defined revenue stream and scale up from there. This builds trust and the much-needed framework to propel you to total transformation.
• Do not fight battles you do not need to. Focus on the issues that your organization is having and solve active problems your customers have. Do not only throw technology at the problem.
• Build a business case by proving increased bad debt savings, labor savings, and interest savings due to reduced working capital.
• In order to assess the current state of Newscorp, MK revealed that their original process was conducted strictly through individual interviews.

Implementing Health and Wellness Programs for your SSO

Patrick McClain, Executive Director HR Shared Services, University of California, San Francisco

The focus on Health and Wellness Programs for your SSO is so key to the overall productivity and delivery of services to our customers. The pandemic brought with it the era of hybrid and remote workspaces; this encourages blurred boundaries between work and home life. Health and Wellness continues to be on the forefront of SSO executives’ minds even as the pandemic reaches endemic levels and yet, according to SSON’s Analytics Global Trends report, 33% of SSOs have a formalized program in place. This session showed us how an SSO executive implemented health and wellness programs into global centers resulting in increased productivity, creation of health boundaries in a hybrid workforce, increase in overall work/life balance, and increased employee engagement. 

• UC research shows that employees in a hybrid world are 2.54x more likely to experience digital distractions, 1.12x more likely to feel they are working too hard at their jobs and 1/27x more likely to struggle to disconnect from work.
• Wellness programs are only as good as their utilization. 96% of companies employed a wellness program, but only 21% of employees actually use it.
• “If it isn’t measurable, it cannot be managed” – Make sure to define your metrics.
  The pillars of healthy wellness leadership include: Providing radical flexibility to your workforce, reducing work friction, driving empathetic management, and making health and wellness a natural extension of the organization’s goals and strategy.
  Patrick used the example of the “three-legged stool” to talk about the balance of wellness. You need an equal amount of support in the self, your work, and your relationships to be considered “a healthy employee”
• Unhealthy employees, or employees who do not have the proper “three-legged stool” balance, are 4x likely to quit, take 9x more sick days a year, and make companies lose 6 full working days of productivity equaling nearly $6.4 billion a year.

Day 3

Culture Isn’t Created from the Top Down: An Exercise in Surviving the Great Resignation

Hector Gonzalez, Director HR Digital Transformation, Solistica

In this session, we heard from the Director of a multinational SSO about how they have gone from double-digit attrition, which was severely stalling the growth of their SSO, to one where attrition is less than 10% and customer SLAs are growing. 

• Hector posits that culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can break down your company’s culture in this way: Your company’s beliefs signal how your company behaves, how it behaves influences the actions that your company performs, and your actions define the positive or negative culture your workplace generates.
• Host meetings with purpose. Solistica hosts a monthly meeting with 24,000 employees in attendance to align on a singular topic. This topic is usually a general one related to culture and teamwork: positive environments, empowerment, transformation, culture, and leadership.
• Create an empathy map for your culture. Put your customer at the center of this map and ask yourself what do they, think, feel, and say. Map this out in the past, present, and future to determine how your organization’s strategies need to likewise change.
• While culture isn’t created from the top down, Hector believed that leaders need to take the time to lead by example and actively show employees empathetic leadership. For instance: Daniel Rodriquez, CEO, claims that HR is the “right arm” of the company, and takes time for 3 full-day workshops to prove that he is available to his employees.
• HR leaders were warned about “The Sin of Omission” – if there are racist, sexist, or other wholly negative aspects to your workplace culture, nothing is changed when you do not step forward and change it. You need to play an active part in the workplace to prevent a feedback loop of negativity.

How Corning Cemented a Business Continuity Mindset to Edge Out the Competition

Michael Schaser, Head of Business Resiliency, Corning Incorporated

Corning has a long history of delivering life-changing products. The ability to sustain a competitive business for 170 years requires a resilient mindset and approach to processes, systems, and people. We learned how Corning Services adopted a business continuity mindset as part of daily operations to sustain Corning’s competitive advantage in today’s complex and challenging environment.

• Over and over, Michael preached the necessity for back-ups. Nothing ever works perfectly the first time. As a trial, his VP insisted he pull the plug on the company’s security program to ensure the backup program worked.
• 91% of all cyber attacks begin with a phishing email. Phishing attacks have increased 436% in recent years, and ransomware demands increased 144% in 2021 to $2.2 million.
• A three-part plan was laid out to tackle a business continuity plan:
  • Proactive Measures: Build a cross-organization response playbook to know what everyone’s role is in an attack, who gets involved and when. Create a framework that is scalable and repeatable. Have a deployment plan. Cultivate a culture where people are prepared and calm in the event of an attack.
  • Crisis Response: Deploy your playbook when an incident occurs. Ensure cross-organizational coordination. Have the appropriate Business Continuity Plan ready to be actioned. 
  • Restoration and Resumption: Continuously improve and learn what you can from each attack. Attacks will only become tricker and you have to prepare your employees and your business. Update playbooks and tighten up continuity plans. Finally, recognize when team members pull their weight in an emergency as their studies have shown teams are more likely to respond quicker and more calmly to a second crisis when they are recognized for their behavior and actions during the first. 

Keynote Plenary: Your GBS Could be Extinct!

Rich Dobbs, VP GBS, Kimberly-Clark

In this final plenary session, we learned from a world-class GBS leader what he sees for the future of GBS and Shared Services. What does the roadmap look like and how can we prevent falling behind? 

• We opened this session with the history of disruption in the US. Within 15 years, cars overtook the horse and buggy. The CEO claims no one will own or operate a car by 2030. The smartphone surpassed Nokia's dominance within 15 years. Change happens fast. If you’re not actively looking for what’s next, you’re already behind.
• The implementation of AI processes will reverse the traditional GBS model to focus workers on judgment-based work that adds value back to the business.
• In the future, value will be measured 10-20% in labor costs arbitrage and work absorption, 10-20% in productivity and insights through Intelligent Transformation, and 20-40% in actionable business insights.
• How do you adapt? The four C’s: Cost, Capacity, Capability, and Compliance
• The 3 Rules for GBS Survival:
  • Value = Cost Effectiveness + Create Value with Business Insights + World-Class CX
  • Agility = Responsiveness to Business Needs + External Disruptions + Fast-Track Integration of New Scope
  • Reduce Friction = Talent Strategy + Keep Learning from Peers & Competition
• Rich claimed that to survive in the new GBS space you must tie itself to a purpose, invest as much time and money in developing talent as they do acquiring them, find new ways to create value beyond what is been historically done, become the tip of the speak for innovation, data, and process for the organization, and become an active listener to your business partners.