SSO Pro Student Spotlight: Sally Yulo, PepsiCo

Graduate Name: Sally Yulo

Company: PepsiCo / The Smith’s Snackfood Company Pty. Ltd.

Title: Reporting and Control Manager

How long in this position? Seven months (recently transferred to Smiths, but with PepsiCo since Mar 2001)

Graduated SSO Pro Course: November 2014

Q: What are three main challenges in the year ahead?

The 3 main challenges in the year ahead are:

1. Reviewing the scope of R2R activities currently outsourced

2. Process simplification / streamlining of existing processes

3. Building skills of current talent pool in SSC

Q: How has the SSO Pro course helped develop some solutions to these?

The concepts learned helped to set the tone for the action plan and the forums help to give the practical insights.

Q: How are you implementing some of the learnings from your course internally?

I am sharing the learnings I have gained with my team, onboarding them on how the SSC works, what I learned during the Knowledge Transfer stage, and sharing the long-term benefits. This gives the team the motivation to be able to teach the current process more effectively.

Q: Have you been able to share some of the tools and templates with your team and/or stakeholders (customers/suppliers) to improve your processes to?

Certainly. In my Dubai HQ role, I shared templates I had used in my earlier SSC days (at PepsiCo’s captive SSC) with the team. This helps documents the recon process of intra-company accounts.

Q: What was your favourite module? How has it impacted your day-to-day work?

My favourite module was the one on Talent Management. It gave me insight on how we can preserve knowledge within the existing talent pool. This impacted my previous role, as the turnover was quite high and it helped me to think about how we can ensure that documentation is in place and knowledge transfer can be better handled.

Q: Can you share a specific example of a concept, tool or skill learned in SSO Pro you’ve directly applied in your organization?

I have used what I learned in the internal benchmarking module in my current role. As I was the Shared Services Manager for PCIL Dubai prior to my current role, I am aware of a few practices in R2R, mainly on Intraco transactions, that can be leveraged to bring more efficiency into the current process. We have requested the SSC Team to look at the current Dubai HQ process and will be preparing for the scoping change next year, to decide which activities we can ‘Lift and Shift’.

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Q: What have you done internally to recognize and celebrate your accomplishment?

I notified my reviewer, Gary Critchley, and my immediate boss, Vineet Jain, and both have sent me their congratulations. Tony Breen [who heads the SSO] also sent me a congratulatory message and copied all the rest of the Shared Services Managers across the AMEA Sector.

Q: If you could choose anyone to moderate one of our modules, who would it be and what would they share?

I would love to see Indra K. Nooyi [Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, PepsiCo] share her thoughts on leadership and Global Financial Shared Services at PepsiCo.

Q: Are there any topics that you feel we should include in the course in going forward?

I would like to see sessions on harmonization and bringing best practices to an existing service.

Q: What are the main trends or innovations that are affecting your services delivery, today?

Streamlining and productivity are the main trends now, and the key topics for me across markets. I am thinking about how to have a more integrated process that can bring efficiencies to R2R process (reporting).