From Optimizing Processes to Enhancing Experience - A Practitioner Viewpoint

Traditional thinking has it that the Global Process Owner is responsible for influencing Shared Services’ success. And indeed, maintaining a broad, end-to-end view of an entire process, GPO roles have achieved significant results – allowing the organization to be more efficient and effective in better serving internal business partners.

But I am going to say something surprising: It is not enough to look only at the process.

While GPOs make processes more efficient and effective, they have not really addressed employee, supplier, and customer pain points. Indeed, a well-designed, standardized process creates efficiencies but it won’t capture the ever-changing needs of employees and what they require to perform their work. With today’s pressure on labor and talent, it’s more important than ever that we provide our employees with a great experience, or they will leave.

After 20+ years working in and around shared services at varying stages of maturity, I can honestly say there’s not one right way to leverage a GPO. What I will say is we need to expand the role of GPO to a Global Experience Owner (GXO).

At Mars, the GXO role is integrated across all service lines within our Shared Services Organization, known as Mars Global Services (MGS). If the business were a body, MGS is the spine, working as the central nervous system for our segments — Mars Wrigley, Food, Petcare and Edge — in the areas of People & Organization (or Human Resources), Digital Technologies, Finance, Commercial, Laboratories and Consumer Insights. While Mars is a large, successful multinational we are relatively young in the Shared Services progression. Our global experience organizations are evolving along with MGS as our footprint expands to value-added services. We are growing, adapting, and shaping the processes we support, always working in service of our business partners, operational teams, and external stakeholders to deliver value. 

However, our north star has changed from focusing on how to optimize processes to how to enhance the experience of the user.

It’s exciting to be a GXO as we transform overall Finance at Mars through increased digital capabilities. Few roles are as well-positioned as the GXO to drive success. Looking globally and across functions, the GXO grasps the challenges and opportunities within an existing process. Productivity is a given, but experience is an imperative. The GXO takes a global view to assess how similar or different processes are across markets, understanding common pain points. With that insight, s/he determines what process, tools, data, and experience are required, ranging from the development of a common portal to fully redefining an activity, including the use of advanced algorithms and machine learning.

But GXOs don’t just identify problems – they help solve them, as they are well-positioned to collaborate effectively. Understanding how and where the output fits into the larger picture, the GXO role drives meaningful change that can dramatically overhaul an organization’s ability to deliver value to employees, customers, and suppliers.

For example, in a Source-to-Pay organization, a GXO understands the full breadth of the process from the upstream components (vendor lifecycle management, sourcing and contracting, and requisition to receipt) all the way through the accounts payable activities, and how those operations affect downstream processes. The difference now is that all this is done with an experience-first mindset. This end-to-end investment in understanding the experience is what truly allows the GXO to be a cohesive, unifying force in aligning disparate teams and driving significant transformation.

Through the lens of experience, the GXO understands the global landscape of people, processes, and tools, and as a result can shape the operating model — the way processes are performed, what tools enable processes, and more importantly, what capabilities are required. The GXO also measures process health, using their influence to drive a better user experience, lower transactional costs, and create safe, controlled processes.

A GXO needs to address several stakeholders, but none more important than the employees that use our services and the operations teams that deliver them (and yes, they are consumers of services as well). The process users and operators are most productive when processes and tools function well, requiring little manual intervention. Think of Amazon Prime. With just one click, you can order, track, and receive a package in a single day. It is not unlike the role of the GXO, working to ensure we are creating sustainable, easy-to-use processes and workflows that allow employees to focus on growing the business.  

I often joke that the best compliment you can give is that you don’t even know I exist. But my influence is everywhere! Whether setting up a new role in the organization, welcoming a new employee, paying your supplier, or delivering that shipment, the GXO is working to ensure everything flows like water running through pipes.

SSON is grateful for the support and guidance of Angela Mangiapane, President, Mars Global Services, who sits on SSON’s Global Advisory Board.

This article is extracted from SSON Research & Analytics’ Research Insight Report Series – End-to-End Process Integration and Optimization: the [Critical] Role of the Global Process Owner. Download the report here: https://www.sson-analytics.com/process-optimization/research-insight-reports/rir-2