Many of our clients that have successfully introduced Technology Business Management, take a next step in their journey and apply similar practices to their Shared and Corporate Services.
 
We are pioneers in Business Management for Shared and Corporate Services and have successfully transformed functions such as HR, Corporate Real Estate, Communications, Legal, Finance, Risk Management, Asset Management and others.
 
We help our clients to articulate the services that they provide in a language that their business customers understand. We provide them with an end-2-end understanding on how services are delivered by contributions of multiple functions (e.g. how technology supports services delivered by Finance). We bring along a variety of best practices on how to create transparency on service costs and consumption, how to install end-2-end responsibilities within the organization and how to set up commercial processes and interfaces with their customers. Our clients are enabled to communicate and adjust the cost, quality, and value of their Shared and Corporate Services to their business partners’ needs. With that, they are shaping and contributing to the strategic business agenda by driving growth, innovation, and agility of an enterprise.
 
We achieve high acceptance and longevity of our solutions by tailoring our best practices to the characteristics and objectives of our clients. We embed them into daily decision making, management routines and core financial processes, such as budgeting and charging.

Drivers for change — The costs of the corporate center have traditionally trended upwards. With increased pressure on profitability and costs and a need to free up budgets for important technology innovations, the 70 business units have challenged the corporate center and requested more transparency on services, costs and cost recharges. On the other hand, the corporate center lacked the ability to steer demand behaviors of the business units and get their buy-in for efficiency initiatives such as optimization of office space, rationalization of legacy applications and digitization of operations processes. Benchmarks of peer companies suggested that operating costs could be significantly reduced with adoption of more commercial principles for managing demand and supply of services between corporate center and the business units.
 
Project objectives — Design a new interaction model that supports consolidation of service demand, launching of joint efficiency measures to reduce operating costs as well as 2-way service level agreements between corporate center and the business.
 
Project approach — A fast assessment together with the internal Strategy team revealed that the interaction model needed four key capabilities:

1. An organization agnostic service catalogue for corporate center that facilitates the dialogue on demand and supply of services.
2. A service costing capability that provides transparency on costs and consumption of services and supports trade-off decisions with data, facts and benchmarks.
3. A service planning process between corporate center and the business units that improves cost efficiency by matching demand with supply of services in line with cost priorities of the business.
4. A service-based charging model that aligns incentives among the business units through true-and-fair charges that reflect service demand.

Achievements — Introducing an end-2-end service catalogue created an internal understanding on the enterprise value chain and how the corporate center provides value to the business units. This transparency was leveraged to restructure the corporate center in a more customer-oriented way. Reduction of overheads and decommissioning of low value services led to significant cost savings. Joint service planning together with the business units created a mutual understanding between corporate center and its customers that are now able to identify opportunities for cost savings and strategic investments on a regular basis. Overall the company has increased its profitability and allocate significant funds into digital capabilities important for its future success.