SSON Announces: North American Excellence Awards Winners 2015

SSON is delighted to announce the North American winners for 2015 The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network has just released the names of its North American winners, and the list showcases outstanding examples from industry as well as higher education, highlighting the continued upwards shift of Shared Services models as a source of improved performance and value. This year’s awards were again hosted by ISG, long-time sponsors of this prestigious honor. Susan Danino, Partner, Americas at ISG, opened the ceremony, which took place at SSON’s 19th Annual Shared Services & Outsourcing Week in Orlando: "ISG is honored, once again, to be hosting the SSON Excellence Awards. This was a very exciting year for the awards as SSON received more applications than ever before from organizations all over the world," Danino said. "They represented all industries, from higher education to Fortune 500 to huge BPOs to the Federal Government. But one thing tied them all together – they all had a terrific story to tell." The judges for 2015 (see picture below) were: Michael Garvey, former VP & Director, Business Integration Services and Solutions, Leidos Debbie Rich-Walker, Senior Manager, Finance, Home Depot Debbie Vander Bogart, Head, Global Shared Services, Levi Strauss & Co. Edward Hansen, Partner, McCarter & English LLP (not present) Above from left: Heather King, event producer, Debbie Rich-Walker, Michael Garvey, Debbie Vander Bogart, and for the Awards sponsor, Susan Danino from ISG An impressive group of companies were nominated this year and the judges had the difficult task of narrowing this down to just one winner and one runner up. EXCELLENCE IN CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD Winner: TalkTalk Telecom/Wipro Team Runner up: The University Of California, Berkeley Campus Shared Services IT Team Debbie Vander Bogart, in introducing the Runner Up, explained: As the Runner Up, we are acknowledging a team in their infancy when it comes to Shared Services, but they have really knocked it out of the park in terms of creating value with customer service at the forefront. Through various initiatives they have achieved overall satisfaction scores greater than 90% and net promoter scores of 80% – all while tripling their customer base. In describing the winning team from TalkTalk Telecom/Wipro, Vander Bogard said: Using data analytics and a strong partnership between SSO and BPO provider this team had a profound impact on a base of more than 4 million customers! Through the creation of a priority service team they addressed and resolved repeat calls, whereby the roadblock was 60% repeat customer issue calls in every 90-day period. Through their partnership, they initiated a repeat call reduction strategy focused on those customers who were generating the maximum number of repeats. This initiative involved some rapid changes both on the process and the people front. It was the first of its kind of initiative where priority service for high repeat callers was coupled with robust data capture and analytics-based insights around repeat dynamics. The initiative involved upskilling agents, changes to IVR, designing case management processes, and data capture. In a very short time frame this team achieved: a reduction in calls from an average of 2.3 to less than 1 faster resolution times – from 17 to 5.5 days reduced customer tickets to roughly 1,800 tickets weekly EXCELLENCE IN PEOPLE AND COMMUNICATIONS AWARD Winner: Yale University Runner Up: Cargill In introducing Cargill as Runner Up, Vander Bogart explained: This team services more than 50,000 employees across North America and during the recent ‘open enrollment’ period used a multi-faceted communications approach designed to reach the organization’s diverse population. It also introduced new vehicles this year including two six-minute videos and a Yammer group devoted to benefits. The results: 93% of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they had enough information to make an informed choice among the medical plan options 84% of survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they believe by being personally accountable for managing their health, they can influence the overall cost of their health care premiums and out of pocket expenses 86% of survey respondents said they agree or strongly agree that the open enrollment communications clearly outlined the steps to earn the wellness incentive" Vander Bogart introduced Yale's winning application as follows: A highly informed and customer oriented staff along with accurate and timely communications are paramount for this team to deliver on the mission of providing superior business support services to their customers; so this team turned the spotlight on internal operations and created programs to advance key metrics that allowed them to drive a culture of service support and transparency along with promoting one Shared Services team. They had to continue to educate their staff on how integrated the work is across departments within Shared Services and show them the link back to the various departments they service. By thus focusing on the internal development of their people this Shared Services team: improved their Customer Satisfaction scores from the 30% percentile to the 90% percentile decreased their turnaround time for closing from 7.4 days to 1.8 days showed a 25% increase in First Call Resolution Excellence in Value Creation Award Winner: Cisco Systems Runner Up: PepsiCo In announcing the Runner Up, Michael Garvey said: PepsiCo’s focus was on transitioning to a hybrid service delivery model comprised of outsourcing, captive shared services and centers of excellence by harmonizing, simplifying and automating service delivery across P2P, O2C, R2R and Payroll process towers. In doing so, the team created a baseline of what and how services would be provided, vetted it against other similar business models (best practices) and developed a plan to execute. A separate internal team was devoted to change management. The newly created organization would be the global process owner for all enabling technologies for shared services. The winner, Cisco, as Garvey explained, was challenged to "Transform the Work Experience" for its employees and customers globally. To do this, internally, a workplace conversion plan was created to address the physical environment, push through a pervasive technology integration, and introduce flexible work policies. Its program included: Research Review and analysis of previous design pilot projects Development of an end-to-end delivery process Solution design development Development of a change management program Comprehensive training of internal delivery teams and service provider staffs Continuous process improvement and performance measurement cycles The primary lesson Cisco learned was that the success or failure of the new implementation would be directly attributed to the quality of the change management delivery program. Excellence in Improvement and Innovation Award Winner: MasterCard Runner Up: University of California Risk Safety Shared Services Debbie Rich-Walker winner introduced the winner and runner up in this category. In announcing University of California as Runner Up, Rich-Walker explained that through software the team there have reduced risk and increased safety awareness to enable more employees and visitors to return home safely and uninjured at the end of each day. This team supports 10 campuses and 5 medical centers, and overcame traditional barriers in the higher education industry to successfully implement a shared services model for continuous delivery and deployment of software –s resulting in 100% adoption of their solution offering. The winner, MasterCard (see team, at left), operates in a highly collaborative working environment, Rich-Walker explained. Collectively, four key groups support seven business units and five regions, which include oversight for 50 countries and support 23 languages. Their implementation journey involved over 800 Finance professionals and migrated from a decentralized fragmented process into a centralized shared services environment. MasterCard’s team not only standardized their entire global process but also delivered robust technology solutions. Today, the new process improvement framework enables the continuous identification of improvements and challenges the status quo. Using metrics data analytics and automation tools, they are now equipped to gain better business insights and drive performance based on facts. The team demonstrates collective passion and innovation to help raise the bar. In fact, they created an innovation center that leverages social media such as Twitter to increase staff engagement across their multi-generational staff, resulting in higher engagement and improved service delivery. This new brand is notorious for its commitment to service delivery, process standardization and value add creation. Results include: Electronic payments increased from 64% to 93% Invoice Imaging soared from 35% to 90% T&E compliance up from 85% to 98% Cost per invoice reduced by a staggering 50% Excellence in Culture Creation Award Winner: Nationwide Runner Up: PepsiCo Michael Garvey introduced the Runner Up, PepsiCo, as having driven detailed cultural change to a globally centralized (21 countries) operating model for their shared services within a year. Today, Global Financial Shared Services is now leading the way with Finance Transformation. The winner, Nationwide, Garvey explained, showed incredible drive in a short amount of time while being challenged to address cultural issues affecting the entire company, specifically with performance management. To address workplace matters relating to compliance and risk, an office of Associate Relations was created and a detailed and realistic organizational change management (OCM) plan, including training, communications, and marketing at all levels, was introduced to support the cultural vision of the leadership team. SSON Practitioner of the Year: Debbie Vander Bogart, Vice President, Global Shared Services at Levi Strauss & Co. Debbie (above, with event producer Heather King) has a long and illustrious (!) career at both Gap and today Levi Strauss & Co., and excels in terms of her achievements as well as her encouragement of others on her team. She also: is responsible for Levi’s Global Shared Services [GS2] strategy, development and implementation in support of 110 country business footprint has re-created the existing shared services center in the US to cover not just Americas, but also European support for 23 European entities has established a shared service center in Singapore to cover all Asia Pacific operational support Levi’s was strictly an F&A organization when Debbie came on board but over the last few years she has been crucial in spearheading the effort to transition into a GBS organization, bringing HR and IT into the fold. One of her passions in shared services centers around talent – her organization has home grown almost all of its talent tools, branded its SSO for employee connectivity and has a rotation program between the business and the SSO. [eventpdf] Editor's note: If you like this content – please share it with your social media groups across Twitter and LinkedIn. 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SSON Announces: North American Excellence Awards Winners 2015

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