SSON’s Impact Awards are globally recognised, annual awards that honour and celebrate achievements across several different categories across four different regions in the world. Applications are evaluated by a judging panel made up of leading practitioners selected for their experience and are exemplary members of the services delivery community.

Here we share an edited version of Lions winning application for the Business Resilience Impact Award recognised at the Australasian Shared Services & Outsourcing Week.

About Lion And their SSO

Lion is a leading beverages company in Australasia, with fast growing craft operations in the US. Lion produces, markets and sells alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and operates worldwide. At Lion, our core purpose is to champion sociability and help people to live well.

Created in 2017, Enterprise Services (ES) is Lion’s Business Service team. Scope includes PTP, OTC, HTR and RTR processes with new COE’s launched in 2020: Data and Reporting COE and Business Process Excellence COE. Enterprise Services vision is to be ‘Trusted to Make Business Easy’.

Overview

Prior to 2020, ES had a documented BCP strategy which focussed on key processes, time required to stand each process up with a 24hour, 48 hour and 72hour priority. The focus was to recover business critical, customer or vendor impacting services as a priority to enable Lion to continue to operate.

These plans, however, were found to be lacking against the 2020 Global Pandemic. Lion was thoroughly tested with the COVID-19 outbreak in March; followed by a cyber-attack in June. During this period ES was also delivering TSA services as part of Lion’s M&A program as well as preparing for a SAP4 HANA go live.

The top 3 things ES learnt from these events were:

• Never waste a crisis! ES was able to implement new ways of working in an accelerated way as there was a burning platform to act.
• Support your people. Providing different ways to connect as a team socially was crucial working remotely. Activities such as virtual drinks or team virtual trivia made a real difference to wellbeing through creating a sense of purpose.
• Be focused on the goal but be flexible in how you achieve it. ES learnt you can’t plan for every business disruption event. Challenges and assumptions can change quickly. Beginning and end of day stand up’s ensured our teams were across priorities and current work conditions.

Business Resilience Approach

The key enabler of Lion’s crisis response has been a disciplined governance framework, and meeting cadence that the business quickly mobilised across the Group Leadership Team, functional areas, and business units to streamline prioritization, communication and decision implementation.

ES worked with Lion’s outsource partner in the early stages of the pandemic to develop a work from home solution. Considerations such as data protection measures, and continuity of access was addressed in case of power or internet outages. As a result, the offshore team was ready to work remotely from day 1.

ES leveraged their customer debt profiling and analytics to provide thought leadership on options available to minimise the impact on customers experiencing significant business disruption whilst also managing Lion’s financial risk.

The critical part of Lion’s cyber-attack recovery plan was an end-to-end process approach and a clear understanding of upstream and downstream impact dependencies. Business SMEs for each critical process were brought together into cross functional teams who worked through recovery plans.

Principles such as minimising customer and supplier impacts, protecting key financial outcomes, and ensuring employee payments, enabled timely decisions and actions. Lion’s approach modified as their various systems were brought back online, and their recovery approach had to remain flexible, relying on clear role and decision-making principles, supported by structured meeting cadence.

By implementing these principles, ES continued to deliver all services to the business during this extended period of business disruption. Enterprise Services has now orientated BCP thinking to Business Resiliency planning, expanding the scope and creating BCP champions across their service teams.

Benefits and Improvements

Despite the unprecedented challenges Lion faced in 2020, Enterprise services managed to achieve the following outcomes:

• Business Partner Engagement grew from 9% to 85%
• People’s Engagement Score increased 4% to 76%
• Successful SAP4 HANA went live in August 2020 with no reduction in service outcomes
• Process improvement, being one of ES’s strategic pillars, overachieved their 2020 goal by almost 200%
• Proactive Debtor Management resulted in no unexpected bad debt write-offs, reflecting ES new debtor collection strategies developed in partnership with its sales team and business unit finance directors.

Enterprise Services successfully responded to 4 key business disruption challenges in 2020, which is why Lion has been awarded as SSOW’s Business Resilience Impact Award Winner.