Missed Part 4 of the series? View SAP's award-winning transformation journey HERE.

SSON's Impact Awards are globally recognized, annual awards that honour and celebrate shared services achievements across several different categories, across four different regions in the world. Applications are evaluated by a judging panel made up of leading practitioners selected for their experience and are exemplary members of the services delivery community.

Today’s shared services operating models are the engine of enterprise transformation. Here we share an edited version of Hewlett-Packard (HP)’s winning application for the Creative Talent Management Impact Award in Asia.

ABOUT HP & OUR SSO

Finance Global Operations (FGO) is the center of excellence for Finance, managing the transaction environment through Shared Service Organizations (SMART HUBs) to deliver frictionless operations. We are responsible for delivering all Finance operations services including end-to-end management of procure-to-pay, record-to-report, quote-to-cash and payroll processes.

We are driven by our mission statement to be the best finance organization ever, and to achieve that all our decisions, investments and activities are anchored around people. We are early adopters of all new technologies and leverage them intensively in our operations & day-to-day business to becoming more agile, lean & future ready.

Geographically, we are spread across 40+ countries, with SMART HUBS in India, China, Poland & Mexico. Almost 60% of our people are based out of India/China hub. Majority of our people have Finance background, with few Engineers & MBAs. We help the larger Finance & the organization to continue to innovate on digitalization, Intelligent-Automation, Analytics and building skills of the future.

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BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Since our formation in Nov 1, 2015, our focus was always on our people and their development. During initial years of our formation, running the business took the front seat as formation of company comes up its own set of challenges, with talent transformation was happening at each of the SMART HUBs

Our business objectives to drive creative talent transformation started in 2018 to keep pace with changing customer expectations & business opportunities to upskill our employees, along with to

• Elevate role of FGO as strategic business partners and position Finance as a competitive advantage for HP
• Drive innovation, end-to-end visibility and continuous improvement using Digital
• Leverage our first mover advantage and become leaders for digital transformation

STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT

At each wave of technological disruption, our talent transformation journey became more robust. Moreover, it always aligned perfectly with leadership mandate of

• CEO’s business strategy of Advance, Disrupt & Transform
• Chief Transformation Officer vision of transformation to become a more customer-obsessed company
• CFO’s talent management strategy of transforming the way we work and better serve our customers

Discover more award-winning journeys at the SSON Impact Awards: The Winners Series  

OBJECTIVES

While designing our talent transformation framework, our focus on people development remained constant:

1. Focusing on 360-degree development of employees in Digital (RPA, AI, Analytics etc.) & Fundamental (empathy, leadership, storytelling etc.) skills of future
2. Enabling Finance background people to experiment with hot technologies & leverage them in their proces
3. Awarding Global recognitions (videos of on-the-ground people explaining their Digital contributions) & building personal brands using poster children

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

Our challenges & opportunities has remained consistent over the years – people want to transform, and for this they are excited & motivated. At each year since 2018, we are working to provide our employees the ability & opportunities to go through this journey themselves. Hence, it was never a prescriptive framework, but always employees choosing what do they want to learn & implement.

THE FRAMEWORK

Our multi-year structured journey to create value through data, make operations frictionless & create future ready people started with building relevant skills, creating business impact & repeating the cycle again. We have divided this into four-stages:

LEARN stage, where we launched learning environments with specific curriculum on Robotics, Analytics & Digital awareness, till FY19.

APPLY stage, where we launched Intelli-Fest.

• Intelli-Fest: A hackathon to transform FGO through Intelligent Automation with active participation from all employees in FGO.

GROW stage, with Roles of Future & Digital Skills Development programs.

• Roles of Future: Identified critical roles & skills needed for the organization, & supported people to grow into that role.
• Digital Skills Development: Trainings on DIY technologies for citizen led solutioning.

TRANSFORM stage, with a comprehensive deep-dive current process analysis to identify cross hubs (IA) opportunities & end-to-end visibility.

JOURNEY TOWARDS TALENT TRANSFORMATION

Our multiyear journey for talent development & transformation was kick started in FY 18 with a target of transforming 100% of our workforce future ready, promoting a culture of growth mindset and digital savviness under Learn, Apply, Grow & Transform framework.

Since its inception, we have gone through identification of key skills changing the market landscape, prioritizing/imparting these skills across FGO to ensure success of strategic initiatives. A clear roadmap has been formulated for building skills of the future in FGO. Learnings and assets from these programs are being leveraged for skill development initiatives across Finance.

As a result, of FGO’s success in implementation of skills development initiative, we were given an opportunity to lead the same across finance. After delivering 94% completion for DC 1.0 for complete Finance, our leadership started contemplating about the next phase of talent transformation. 

HURDLES AND RESOLUTIONS

Proactive measures were taken to overcome challenges & resistance anticipated during this journey to alleviate any apprehensions in minds of employees, stakeholders & customers by

Robust change management plan

• Enabling employees to visualize implementation of technology in their roles – “What is in it for me?”
• On-boarding them on the choice of right technologies/software products for implementation, and helping them build it

Integrated communication plan

• Management by Example by helping everyone to move from anxiety to aspiration
• Leadership communication that going digital must be seen more as an opportunity than a threat
• Employee involvement in each step of process transformation using Intelligent Automation

Building culture of celebrating digital & IA

• Practicing Digital & Intelligent Automation – Digital floor walks, no reports over emails, mobile app-based approval workflows etc.
• Crossword and puzzles on Digital technologies available at HP
• Global recognitions (videos of on-the-ground people explaining their Digital contributions) & building personal brands using poster children
•  

BENEFITS & IMPROVEMENTS

Because of the framework & initiatives, we have already achieved 11% costs reduction on the business-as-usual processes & skills for our people for this year. Moreover, as part of our framework, all initiatives led to strategic level benefits:

• No impact of Covid-19 because we already had digital organization
• Culture impact: people with no prior technology background can become Digital Leads & Digital Analysts

The idea is that with all these gamut of DIY technologies, we will drive future opportunities for not only FGO but also HP. For example, these technologies will give not only result in efficiency benefits but also effectiveness measures like improving on DPO, DSO, duplicate payments etc.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Keep it simple: All technologies are DIY & drag-&-drop with availability of SMEs for additional help
2. Keep it relevant: Trainings with Finance Operations use cases & data for easy understanding & faster implementation
3. Keep it exciting: Introducing Gamification & Global Recognition adds to employee motivation & adoption of Digital culture building

Column 6 of the SSON Impact Awards: The Winners Series available next Friday!