Creating Exceptional People Experiences Through Digital Resilience

Recently named a Top 20 Most Admired Shared Services organization, Takeda Business Solutions (TBS) has quickly earned its stripes as a true driver of digital transformation, taking center stage for its ability to harness the power of data and digital to create exceptional experiences for its stakeholders. In the two years since its inception, TBS has evolved from a traditional captive shared services provider to an agile organization, collaborating with the business and IT colleagues to develop and embed new process and technology solutions.   

Takeda’s finance vision focuses on partnering to deliver insights and drive value for patients through four critical enablers:

1. agile thought partners
2. stewards
3. digital champions, and
4. process experts.

To achieve this, TBS – a key business partner – provides simplified and innovative solutions across finance, procurement, and human resources, creating value by freeing up time so employees can focus on core operations and better serve patients.

TBS managed to weather the COVID-19 pandemic by adapting its process portfolio to meet the evolving needs of its stakeholders and the workforce, implementing a creative digital strategy, and empowering its people to challenge the status quo.

As a result, while a recent report by SSON Analytics found that 60% of SSOs/GBS had experienced operational impacts in the first year of the pandemic, TBS remained resilient. 

Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital

Following its 2019 acquisition of Shire, Takeda needed to rapidly accelerate its digital transformation to evolve into an agile, data-driven culture where automation could be scaled to deliver process efficiencies – a focus that is reflected in its refreshed Corporate Philosophy, in which a key imperative is “unleashing the power of data and digital.” 

Within the Global Finance organization, CFO Costa Saroukos and Head of TBS Sanjay Patel shared a vision of fostering a culture of digital literacy and citizen-driven innovation that would enable Takeda to deliver on its commitments.

Tapping into this vision, TBS partnered with IT to build an innovation hub to introduce digital solutions, artificial intelligence, robotics, automation and analytics.

Rather than follow the industry trend of outsourcing, TBS opted to develop its capabilities inhouse, focusing on strengthening employee experience; creating inspiring, rewarding careers; and ensuring business continuity. 

Through initiatives like the award-winning “Finance Automation Program,” TBS empowers employees to develop next-generation capabilities in solutions such as robotic process automation (RPA). This popular citizen development program allowed TBS to train more than 1,700 employees to develop 512 “bots” that were deployed to automate manual, time-consuming tasks. In doing so, it has saved more than 514,000 productivity hours and delivered significant efficiencies in finance processes such as Record-to-Report, Invoice-to-Cash, and Source-to-Pay.

The flexibility of this model has allowed employees to enhance a wide range of everyday business activities.

Of the family of bots in TBS’ portfolio, “Rikona” is just one example; a solution conceived by Takeda’s Investor Relations team and TBS, Rikona has automated the disclosure reporting process, creating an improved and scalable investor experience and saving up to 1,000 hours of productivity annually.

With people experience and personalization high on the agenda, TBS is deploying machine learning (ML) to automate and strengthen everyday system activities. By leveraging ML capabilities, TBS has simplified its complex travel expense monitoring process – a move that has increased the accuracy of payments and bolstered compliance. 

________________

Benchmark your own performance metrics against those of SSON's Top 20 Most Admired Shared Services Organizations

Details here.

________________

TBS is also tapping into its digital capabilities to meet localized business needs. In Japan, TBS has partnered with the business to introduce intelligent Optical Character Recognition (iOCR) in the supplier invoice payment process. This has cut down on errors, made processes more agile, and demonstrated how TBS is championing paperless processing, in line with Japan’s commitment to become fully digital and operate without paper.

By pairing best-in-class technology with a culture of people empowerment, TBS is creating an agile talent pool of process and robotics experts capable of transforming its ways of working.

Mindset of Innovation

Few solutions demonstrate the agility of TBS’ digital strategy quite like CFOinUrpocket™ – an award-winning app, developed in partnership with IT. This leading-edge global finance dashboard was designed to address complex challenges within Takeda’s finance ecosystem which hindered the business’ ability to quickly access critical financial insight.

The team combined meaningful data with an AI-fueled business intelligence platform – and the vision for CFOinUrpocket™ became a reality. The app has not only delivered standardized financial reporting, but has also offered easy access to powerful business insights, supercharging teams’ decision-making capabilities.

This culture of innovation has also shaped the development of game-changing enterprise solutions like Takeda’s People Resource Hub, a user-friendly employee lifecycle management solution, developed in partnership with HR.

Another example is the Procurement Analytics Hub, a people-centric app developed in partnership with GREFP’s Global Procurement Center of Excellence, which provides employees with easy access to spend data, supplier data, process performance and compliance with the Procurement Policy.

Achieving “Exceptional” Through People Empowerment 

TBS is guided by a laser focus on people experience (Px) – its North Star. The impetus behind its innovation efforts, TBS has developed an outcome-focused Px strategy, centered on its aspiration, “We are committed to creating an exceptional experience where you feel supported & confident in our solutions.”

TBS’ aspiration acts as its compass, ensuring its experience-led solutions are always underpinned by best-in-class approaches to work. 

While the Procurement Analytics Hub delivers substantial value, this digital solution is just one pillar of the end-to-end offering. The wider transformation sought to understand and capture customers’ everyday needs and the resulting operating model made seamless end-to-end collaboration and processes across Global Procurement and TBS a reality – paving the way for the digital success that followed. 

Revolutionizing Shared Service Transformation

With its mindset of positive disruption and culture of grassroots innovation, TBS is empowering its people to challenge the status quo and reimagine its solutions for the betterment of the business. It is equipping them with the capabilities to not only identify opportunities for improvement, but to bring their visions to fruition.

By underpinning its people-first focus with experience-led solutions, accelerated digitalization, and a culture of continuous learning, TBS is reshaping shared services for holistic transformation.

In doing so, TBS earns its well-deserved distinction among SSON's Top 20 Most Admired Shared Services Organizations, revolutionizing the way people, processes, and technologies combine to optimize operations.