India’s Future: Juniper’s Finance Director Sees Technology and GBS as Key

How to manage increased asset turnover, while keeping costs competitive? Susheel Tanwar, SSC Finance Director and Director of Global Business Services for Juniper India, spoke with SSON’s editor Barbara Hodge, earlier this year, about how innovation in talent management and technology is helping cement GBS’s reputation as value-enhancer – and why he is banking on "Sales & Marketing" as growth areas. [The interview took place in January 2014] "It makes a lot of sense to me, to leverage the GBS environment for work that is process driven, be it customer facing or not. Bearing in mind that our shared services is very matured now, we want to move up in the value chain and to expand our footprint into anything that can be done, in any location." Susheel Tanwar, Finance Director and Director of Global Business Services, Juniper India Susheel, could you describe your shared services operation and the model deployed at Juniper? Sure. I’m the director of the GBS for the India operations and our global business services centre takes care of most of the financial and accounting services for our operations worldwide, as well as provide some limited support to marketing and customer services activities. Normally, GBS operations don’t extend into sales and marketing, but we decided to expand on this strategy and bring in these two relatively creative functions. The key idea is to accelerate the asset turnover, as we call it in finance and accounting. We want to achieve more turnover while keeping our costs competitive, and continuing to support as many functions as we can out of India. Recently, we moved our GBS Asia operations to India and currently we’ve got around 180 + headcount. The centre in India was launched sometime in 2005. In terms of supporting the company, we have gotten a lot more aggressive with our plans to move into the sales operation and marketing sides as well. We believe we can make a big impact on Juniper Networks’ worldwide operations. So that’s our strategy for the near future. How are you defining GBS? I see it like this: there are three different models when it comes to sourcing. The basic model is the shared services centre; the second, in terms of the value chain, I’ll call GBS; and the third is the BPO providers (3rd party). The first step in offshoring is to ship work to a low cost location, this is how shared services are built. The second stage is the Global Business Services. Global Business Services can also be called "multi function shared services centre". The key idea behind GBS is to leverage the capabilities already built in a shared services model and apply it to additional functions, which are moving into GBS as an organization. This ensures an effective and accelerated execution on the strategy of generating value. You mentioned sales and marketing. One of the trends I am hearing from people who run more sophisticated GBS-branded centres is that there’s a shift from the traditional support functions into the front-facing part of the business, such as marketing and sales. How is that reflected in your strategy? I’m seeing a lot around this – it makes a lot of sense to me, to leverage the GBS environment for such work that is process driven, be it customer facing or not. Bearing in mind that our shared services is very matured now, we want to move up in the value chain and want to expand our footprint into anything that can be done, in any location for their matter. For us, GBS is not just India. We offer our customers the whole package of support in a 24X5 environment, out of different locations. Our strategy is to work two shifts out of India and leverage other existing global locations to complement around the clock support. It’s just like growing a company with additional product offerings. Growing in new functions is a key part of our strategy. During the last couple of decades, India, as a country, has matured significantly in term of people skills, business infrastructure, perception, and its overall willingness to grow. Various Indian companies (and I am not talking about BPO now) do this kind of work anyway (think of any FMCG company), so taking the additional step to do it for others within a BPO sort of environment will not be too difficult. We need to find the right solutions to keep moving forward. Do you think that these customer-facing services moving into Shared Services is a symptom of an expanding market? In other words, because there are growth opportunities in India, sales and marketing are becoming strategically more interesting to leverage? Yes, certainly. I think our definition of target market and our willingness "to do more" – which is a by-product of our capability – is forcing us to move in this direction. We have proved the success of this approach in traditional sourcing activities; hence need to embrace newer areas. You see, the philosophy of business is going to be the same. The difference will be the skill set. With the right execution, results will be positive for India, which will deliver more opportunities to grow. [eventpdf] Give me an idea of how the market has changed in India over the last five years. What are you facing now versus five years ago? How are external market forces impacting the country’s traditional competitive edge? All of us finance guys keep a close eye on these kinds of things. It’s straightforward in my opinion. Five years ago, one dollar was around 40+ rupees and at this point in time it is around 60+ rupees. So the rupee has depreciated by 50% in the last five years. Now, what it means for any US or other developed countries who want to move their work to India is that the Indian market has become 50% cheaper. According to my knowledge, this will stay, as I don’t see any resolution to the factors that caused this. Most of them are related to key Indian economy issues. In the current situation, whether we like it or not, all goods and services will be cheaper if they are exported from India. This automatically solves various cost related issues. As for costs, if Indian inflation keeps on increasing at the rate of 9% year-on-year then it will still take 20 years to make India’s cost equal to 70% of US cost. This is per 2012 data. With the current exchange rates it will even take longer to bridge the gap. A big change that I have seen relates to domestic demand. Our local companies have seen the benefit of shared services/GBS models and they are trying their hands with it. What this means is that domestic interest is growing, and work is no longer only coming from foreign locations to India (i.e., primarily cost driven). Another interesting shift that I have noticed is the growth in popularity/acceptance of this industry in Indian families. The shared services/BPO industry is well respected and people want to build their careers in it. This marks a significant change from the traditional perspective where people grew their careers with very limited choices. It also ensures a good supply of talent from the education system at very competitive prices. Given that we have more technology today that can take care of a lot of things, is there a danger of technology making shared services redundant? Technology can do a lot of things that people are doing in today’s world. If the technology is there it has to be leveraged and if it’s not there then it should be developed, provided it is affordable. The reason being that it’s both efficient and effective. The big question here is "affordability", which comes both from new development and is also the result of continuous updates to current technologies, as business needs change. The choice between the "human brain" and a "Central Processing Unit/CPU" depends upon the overall value (cost / benefit) generation. In my opinion, as long as the business environment stays dynamic, shared services will never become redundant, at least not due to technology. Technology as an enabler can’t replace people completely. I have seen technology reducing human involvement in matured and stabilized business areas, however I have never seen it totally eliminating the need for humans because of the arguments above. What’s been the greatest achievement of your Global Business Services? I think the biggest achievement I’ve experienced here is to set up the shared services centre itself, because when we started building it people were unsure about this kind of thing. When we started pushing this agenda, people were not very comfortable so it took a while for us to develop the centre. Today, our leaders all around the world consider Juniper GBS an integral part of their strategy and involve people like myself, and others, in their planning discussions. This showcases just how much mindshare GBS has earned during the last few years. Are there some metrics you could share that illustrate the contribution of GBS? Yes, there are a number of metrics which I can share based on the processes that we support. Our worldwide manual OM, AP, Accounts Reconciliations, Point of Sales Processing, etc., is run completely out of India. The turnaround time is at "world class" levels. For AP, invoices are processed within 48 hours. All manual Orders gets booked in 48 hours as well. What’s an example of innovation within the GBS? There are two things that I would like to highlight, both on the technology side as well as on the people side. Let me talk about the people side first. One of the challenges that a company of our size definitely faces is how to build a good database of valuable resumes. Normally what a company does is they go to the consultants or the agencies to hire people. But for us, 25% of our recruitment happens through the educational institutes in India. We’ve developed great partnerships and professional agreements with the ICAI (Institute of Cost Accountants of India). Students from the institute reach out to us and we hire them based on our need, train them and allocate business processes. This ensures that I have a constant pipeline of high quality candidates, at varying experience levels, willing to work for us. This was an excellent strategy for us to pursue, which is paying us continuous dividends. Recently, we also went to the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, to hire few interns (10 week internship program) who would help us in executing some strategic projects out of the GBS, India. The other thing we have done is on the technology side. This is related to our interest in building a quality function in GBS. There was a lot of resistance to changing the processes. However, consistent focus helped us to become more successful. We partnered with one of the big four firms to train our small management team on Six Sigma and we built a solid quality team afterwards. Now, our process excellence team is delivering around 10% improvement, year-over-year. They use technology heavily, wherever possible. What is your top goal or priority for the year 2014, and how close are you to achieving this? My top priority at this point in time is to extend my footprint by making an entry into the new functions I mentioned earlier. Sales and marketing could be a good opportunity. Don’t miss Susheel Tanwar’s Workshop on How to build ROI metrics for your Shared Services,at Shared Services & Outsourcing Week India 2014, where he’ll be talking more about technology, specifically how to ensure you are getting a decent 10-15% return. Susheel will explain: How to define the right metrics and analytics to measure performance How to predicting your T&E How (and why) to benchmark your Shared Services How to use an SQPC Model to showcase success of Shared Services How to use EBIT as a determinate of ROI for Shared Services

India’s Future: Juniper’s Finance Director Sees Technology and GBS as Key

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India’s Future: Juniper’s Finance Director Sees Technology and GBS as Key

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