SSOW - EUROPE’S LARGEST & NO.1 SHARED SERVICES & GBS EVENT

SSOW: What do you enjoy the most about being a judge? 

In over 5 years I am surprised that we have never had an argument about a winner. There is always one exceptional application which stands alone. The variety of ideas that we see are amazing, from process improvement and automation to creating a talent pool for the finance organization to delivering value as a business. I am looking forward to this year stories.  

1/8

Caroline Basyn (CB): When we started, we had literally zero people in the organisation. I started on my own and, bit by bit, tried to attract people from within Mondelez to join alongside those from outside of the business. We created a good match of people that had internal expertise of the business and its different functions alongside those who came in with expertise on shared services.

SSOW: You decided to launch immediately with GBS, how did you make the decision?

CB: The decision was very simple for the company. At that point in time Mondelez was struggling to get the growth that they wanted to provide to the shareholders. So it began to question how we can improve the margins. One of the ways to do this was to review the organisation design and leverage the capabilities that typically global business services provide in terms of savings - because they benefit from labour arbitrage and productivity savings.

The productivity savings come from a couple of components: (1.) Leveraging scale, because you get the smallest country, like Nigeria, and do business for them next to the biggest country like US, so you try to leverage that scale. (2.) At the same time, as you centralise everything, you have a good visibility of how you can simplify and standardise the processes. (3.) the third one was how do we automate? How do we digitise? How do we take benefits of technology going anywhere from invoicing, EDI, to what I call sexy part which is robotics and artificial intelligence.

3/8

SSOW: What is your global operating model looking like in terms of the actual locations and how did you decide where to set them?

CB: That’s an interesting question. Our global operation model is a three tier model. We have people in what we call ‘on-shore’, so close to the front office, either in manufacturing site, either in headquarters. We have people in what we call ‘middle offices’ that are, let’s say, in a lower cost location but in the same time zone, can speak the different languages that we have in that time zone and can understand the legal framework. Then we have the third tier, which is radically offshore, typically India or Manila, where we provide the services mostly in English and mostly in a different time zone to Europe or for North America. 

In terms of how we leverage that, we make sure that different procedures, in terms of how we handle the operations, work according to the same cookbook, as we call it. Officially we call it a handbook, but that handbook has ten chapters and every single delivery centre, whether it’s an internal delivery centre or an external one, or whether it’s somebody in our front offices, is leveraging those same chapters and same definitions of operations.

4/8

SSOW: What kind of people do you look for?

CB: It depends for which job, but if you take the majority of the leadership, I always look for three characteristics. One characteristic is pure leadership. What is the kind of drive? What is the kind of communication? What is the kind of project management? What are the leadership capabilities? One of the leadership characteristics we were looking for is entrepreneurship. This was obviously very much needed as well as people who were ready to take some risks, and people who were ready to invent the new way of doing, because within Mondelez it was not that way. 

The second characteristic is that we want business leaders. We want people who have deep, functional expertise. So when we talk about finance, those people are coming with a deep finance background. When we’re talking about procurement, they’re coming from a deep procurement background. The same for marketing, and I can go on for every single function. HR particularly as well. We want a deep, functional expertise and people who understand those processes end to end.

Then the third characteristic is we that we desired people who understand what it is to run shared services. And that expertise I needed to get outside Mondelez, because we didn’t really have it inside. So we were looking for people who would come with integrated lean Six Sigma skills, who would bring those skills of running big, large delivery centres, potentially having created them, and understand what it means to drive operational excellence as well as what it means to drive also services that customers would love to adopt and would love to use. So, individuals who have the end-user or the end-customer in mind.

4/4

We also applied a new project management methodology on top of this innovation idea. It was design thinking. This idea was introduced in the first design thinking incubator run within our company and it brought a lot of value by validating our assumption, by identifying the aims and needs of our real customers. The ones which are really the end customer using these solutions, IT solutions.

SB: to summarise the experiences we had in this project, the challenges. The fact that we run and we deliver with success in, let’s say a conservative space in the oil and gas industry, I would have to say one thing to the audience: I strongly believe that courage is at the heart of every success in our business, so be courageous.  Thank you.