Shared Services & Partnering with Diversity: Part 2

Part 2: Shared Services Onshore - A focus on Transformation & Women

This blog is in two parts. Here is the link to part 1 if you missed it. This blog draws from experiences at two recent conferences, Women in Procurement (May 2015) and Shared Services Outsource Week (June, 2015). Thanks to the organisers for inviting me as a speaker and facilitator.

The ‘buzz’ word of both conferences for onshore, shared services was ‘transformation’. Various brands were at varied stages of their transformation in becoming a shared service or were adding new services like HR, recruitment, expatriate moves and procurement to the usual finance areas. There was also variance in the models and approaches used with larger entities showcasing their GBS (global business service) model. Some of these companies polled their rationale for not offshoring, listing in order: retaining their organisation culture, not having senior stakeholder buy-in, pre-empting a loss of control, questioning quality or the cost differential not being enough to validate the business case.

Methodologies used during transformation

The Purpose

One telco CPO had her own method of how procurement teams delivered their purpose to their customers. Defining the purpose was a key to leading the transition.  She used a four quadrant model early on in her leadership of the team to make decisions with the team about their purpose: Were they going to be functional, business aligned, strategic or tactical?   During networking at the conference, participants shared applications about this model, seeing it as a continuum or identifying some of their services as functional or business aligned. Where does your shared service fit?

 The Tasks & Tools

Apart from many change management models and tools shared, some companies spoke of the lean and agile methodologies when introducing a service under the banner of Shared Services. This is a good best practice – best not to bring inefficiencies, duplication and low value tasks into a hub like Shared Services.

A Director of Human Resources of a leading university provided a unique view of applying operations management principles when transforming a shared services division. With her team she went about applying ops management thinking to assess for repeatable processes and whether it was a person dependent practice, a documented process, was in partial or full deployment, was it measured and automated or delivering continuous improvement?  What tools have you used to lead your transformation?

Women in Shared Services

Through the experiences at both conferences and coaching many women in procurement the similarities of lower representation, lower salaries, limited pathways for upward mobility are echoed for women as in other professions. However, there was a huge acknowledgement of how far women have come in the last 10 years in shared services, the fact that there was actually a Women in Procurement Conference with a sprinkling of men and many female CPO’s demonstrated the milestones and growth. At the Shared Services Conference there was also gender balance representation of speakers who were senior in their roles and at least 1 in 3 on a panel were female on average, so females are part of the discussion. However, more work is of course required for both genders to continually develop women and young professionals in shared services.

One leading bank is deliberate in their attempts, which has seen them grow in their percentages of women in more senior roles. They ensure that there is always representation where possible of women as interviewers on panel interviews and that there are fair percentages of women applying for roles internally.

During the Women in Procurement conference I posed some challenging thoughts on Women run SME’s making it past procurement’s tollgates. Now on the other side, this is quite a personal challenge for me, getting through RFTs!

The International Trade Centre quotes that SME’s account for 80% of the world’s jobs and women entrepreneurs tend to invest 90% of their earnings back in their families and communities which links to inclusive economic growth directly to human development – public procurement has latched onto these facts and outperform corporate procurement globally with being inclusive and supportive of women as suppliers. Alarmingly, 70% of women make purchasing decisions at home, yet women entrepreneurs get 1% of global procurement! They are missing in the supply chain!

One initiative to learn from (in 2013, Times of India) is when Accenture, Intel, Marriot, HP, WalMart and IBM met with 100 women owned and run businesses in India to understand them better and to find out how they could include them in their supply chain. Pioneering in a developing country that has a historic marginalisation of women. What are Australian corporate procurement divisions doing to open the doors to women as suppliers?

Key Learning & Areas of Opportunity

With continued cost and value focus onshore, more repeatable tasks are being scoped to become part of shared services - shared services are also going global in multinationals. Women’s career pathways in the share service profession are a continual development milestone and gap. Women run businesses in Australia need similar support and development.

About the author: Div is the Managing Director and Principal Consultant at MindTribes.  Clients appreciate Div’s differentiator in the market. She works hands on with stakeholders to manage the stabilisation of change either onshore, or offshore with a focus on integration behaviours.  Div holds a BA (Hons) Organisational Psychology, Masters in HRM and is a Certified Executive and Leadership Coach (ICF). See more at www.mindtribes.com.au