Key Takeaways From SSOW LATAM

Earlier this October, SSON brought its Shared Services & Outsourcing Week (SSOW) to Latin America for the 15th year. This year’s SSOW in San José, Costa Rica, was one of the most well attended LATAM events on record and saw attendees come from countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil.

Overall, the event was made up of a variety of individuals from different seniority levels, with 66% as directors, 21% as managers or below, and 13% VPs or higher. This discrepancy in seniority level ensured a wide range of discussions and insights were shared amongst the attendees. Additionally, the event saw a near-equal dispersal of individuals representing finance, HR, and shared services organizations, thus helping guarantee that attendees could network with individuals similar to themselves.

The theme of this year's event was transforming shared services through culture, talent, and process, and the following are some examples of sessions from the conference that delivered on the core themes. 

Leadership Panel

This year’s leadership panel was titled “Managing the Change Experience to Retain Talent and Provide Quality Services” and saw leaders from shared services organizations such as Brose, Syneos Health, and Sanofi participate.

One of the focuses of the conversation was balancing the need to grow employees and providing great services. Some employees in shared services might be ambitious and looking to expand their role and take on more responsibilities. However, leaders cannot let an individual’s career goals impede on the shared services organization’s ability to provide effective and timely services. 

The leaders who took the stage also discussed how transparency has become a critical trait for a business leader in 2023. Today, employees expect a communicative manager, so it’s important that leaders get out of their comfort zone and engage to understand how employees are feeling. Furthermore, they must be willing to elaborate and share details when discussing important matters with employees.

“A good leader communicates news to their employees as soon as possible. They don’t wait for others to start asking questions,” said Claudio Martinez, Executive Director of Global Business Services for Syneos Health. 

Implementing Shared Services 

An important feature of an SSOW conference is the workshops. These workshops typically have qualified moderators lead a brainstorming conversation in which attendees can participate and problem-solve for current challenges in the shared services space. At this year’s SSOW LATAM conference, one of the more popular workshops discussed implementing and advancing shared services with next-generation concepts. Other workshops during the conference focused on using intelligent automation to scale shared services and the risks and potential rewards of implementing citizen developers.

One of the most notable pieces of advice for starting a shared services organization was to focus on the nature of the work and not the work itself. Meaning, start by determining how many of the tasks in shared services are transactional, hands-on, or function-based and figure out if a support system exists to help with different types of work.

Another workshop participant suggested that in this day in age, people should be willing to question prevailing wisdom in shared services, specifically as it comes to standardization. With so many modern businesses operating on a global scale, it might be difficult to offer standardization when different business units have different needs and regulations to follow. This statement underscores the importance of change management in shared services, as it has become a critical element to an organization's ability to adapt to each business unit's demands. 

SSON Impact Awards

SSON's Latin American Impact Awards is a globally recognized annual industry awards ceremony, which honors and celebrates SSC and service delivery teams who have exceeded industry standards in their SS&O initiatives. During this year's ceremony, three awards were handed out for achievements in HR, finance, and automation. Winners and nominees attended an in-person ceremony at the conference and were able to celebrate their accomplishments among colleagues. The winners of the three awards are:

Human Resources Impact Award: Ternium 
Finance Impact Award: Johnson & Johnson 
Automation Impact Award: Johnson & Johnson 

Social media engagement

During the conference, attendees were sharing their experiences on LinkedIn, and there is no better way to demonstrate the experience of attending an SSOW conference than sharing their posts.