Optimizing Processes: TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA

SSON interviews Irmina Buballo-Wojciechowska, Accounting Shared Service Center Branch Director, and Magdalena Rudzka - ASSC Processes Monitoring and Development, Department Director, both working at TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA and will be speaking at the Finance Transformation Europe 2011 conference in London 15-17, February 2011.

SSON: TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA won the Best New Captive Shared Services Organization 2009 Award. How has TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA continued to build on that success since then?Â Â IBW: The biggest benefit of winning the award was it encouragedÂ TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA to move more of our accounting processes over to the shared services center. We succeeded in moving many of the projects of our mobile company, the biggest subsidiary of TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA, over to the shared services center. This project was a major success and now we are handling 95% of all the activities of the TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA group.

We are also planning to initiate a program for accounting finance transformation. The first step in doing so is to move the remaining subsidiaries of TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA over to the Shared Services Center which will take place in 2011. Another goal is to launch an ERP system for the entire group in 2012. These are the two main projects that we wish to implement over the next two years.

After that we will continue optimization of our processes. Our shared services center forms part of a bigger organization, Citigroup, which not only includes accounting functions,Â but also logistics and supply chain, payroll and administration, thus all the G&A functions are under one umbrella. We hope to have end-to-end process management fully up and running by 2015 so that all the supporting functions are in our group.

SSON: Why is employing the correct people so important in you opinion in order to management change effectively? IBW: We have what we call transfunctional process management,Â which means that we need experienced and skilled people to run such a model because it is an environment which is constantly changing. Thus it is extremely important to have people who can adapt to it.

MR: As leader of the department, which manages performance of the center, in my point of view your employees or people working for you form the base of your company. We believe you can do anything if you have the right people working for you. If you think about goals and communication, process and performance quality and effectiveness, continuous improvement, continuous optimization and change management: all these points involve people. You have to keep your employees happy. So if it wasn't for our supportive atmosphere and the ways we managed our employees,Â we wouldn't have achieved any of that. So it's all about how we manage our employees and what we have achieved.Â

SSON: How has TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKA managed to drive costs down and improve processes without compromising on quality? IBW: As I said we have many projects which are related both to process improvement and to the automation of the process. We run many projects which support both paths in conjunction withÂ process improvement.

One example is Lean Six Sigma. The biggestÂ achievement was eliminating paper documentation and the unnecessary use of paper. We also succeeded in reducing our cost for paper flow by 70%.

In terms of process automation,Â we have sectors merging in P2P work flows. These support fixed assets and data flow. We also monitor the process data flow within the system - all of this allows us to eliminate errors and succeed in our day-to-day job.Â

SSON: What have you gained by attending previous SSON events?Â IBW: Â We gained valuable insight and advice and it was reassuring to see that we are moving in the right direction. We also realized that we needed a service delivery model to drive us into the right direction. This service delivery model allowed us to record the activities and time spent by our people, which allowed us to run the ABC costing. Now we are aware of what we are doing and at what cost. Finally, we learnt where we need to look for optimization; a discussion we had at the Shared Services conference showed us the areas that can be improved upon to manage the cost of our activities.

Â Irmina Buballo-Wojciechowska, Accounting Shared Service Center Branch Director, and Magdalena Rudzka - ASSC Processes Monitoring and Development, Department Director, both working at TELEKOMUNIKACIA POLSKAÂ will be speaking at theÂ Finance Transformation Europe 2011 Â conference in London 15-17, February 2011.