Ensure Business Resilience and Crisis Management with Global Shared Services | HCLTech

Ensure Business Resilience and Crisis Management with Global Shared Services

 
August 24, 2021
Anoop Tiwari

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Anoop Tiwari
Senior Corporate Vice President
August 24, 2021
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The coronavirus pandemic has thrown open new challenges toward business landscape and establishments globally. In this dynamic and uncertain environment, challenges and threats are always springing up and evolving constantly. As such, it has become imperative for organizations irrespective of geography or industry, to prepare for the changes and stay resilient to external factors.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, one of the immediate factors at play was the ceasing of face-to-face operations. As more and more people continue to work remotely, organizations are at a unique precipice trying to balance business continuity while empowering the workforce to be productive remotely and virtually. In such a paradigm, the security of business resources and services must take the center stage. Especially, since studies report a staggering 630% rise in threat events to enterprises within the past three months.

Organizations, therefore, are taking several informed steps to combat these challenges in a comprehensive manner. From prioritizing security to embracing agility, and rethinking their service models, they are forced to take measures at restructuring toward business resilience and continuity. In such terms, leveraging domain proficient and technology forward shared services may well be the way to propel businesses forward.

Role of global shared services for modern enterprises

Global shared services (GSS) have played a major role in shaping the business landscape of today. In addition to their domain-specific proficiency, they often contribute to raising the levels of overall efficiency and induce agility to non-core business areas. They have helped numerous organizations looking to provide customer-centric products and services stay one step ahead of the competition.

Numerous organizations have leveraged advanced shared services to holistically improve organizational efficiency. Some of the key areas of expertise for shared services include finance, human resource, and IT. Often the efficiency and agility associated with these operations trickle on to the core business areas and assists the parent organization stay efficient, agile, and thus competitive.

Leveraging GSS towards stability and business continuity

In these testing times, businesses are constantly scrambling to stay afloat while gaining a step ahead of the competition. In the altered state of things, enhancing the efficiency of process and cost with agile operations becomes crucial to procure customer-centric products and services constantly. A good GSS/shared services organization has the agility that other parts of the parent organization may not possess. This can be critical to business continuity and may impact several areas of the parent organization.

A GSS is essentially an infrastructure investment that has the potential to step up in the event of a crisis. The team can assist the parent organization by making changes aimed at economizing thereby helping the company avoid any additional cost.

Most GSS organizations are initially onboarded to control and reduce costs but eventually evolve to be the driving centers of agility with a direct impact on the effectiveness and quality of services. They are often seen as the harbinger of a radical transformation. Having a GSS as an asset to the organization can often be the key differentiator in recognizing how the parent organization deals with impacts. With its unique perspective as a horizontal organization that runs end-to-end process lines within an organization, a GSS can quickly leverage the horizontal metrics to help identify gaps and key line areas that are under duress owing to the crisis. This, in turn, enables them to collaborate with departments like procurement and IT to ensure that the individual efforts complement each other toward countering the business challenges.

Role of intelligent automation in IT evolution

As GSS or shared services continue to grow their influence in terms of offering resilience to organizations, they keep on infusing technological innovations into their lineup of processes and procedures. Intelligent automation, for example, has tremendous potential to revolutionize back-office by automating manual and repetitive tasks thereby freeing up hours that are more productive toward business-critical operations. Amidst the criticality of the new normal, the added advantages can often prove to be the key differentiator.

As GSS or shared services continue to grow their influence in terms of offering resilience to organizations, they keep on infusing technological innovations into their lineup of processes and procedures

Intelligent automation allows standardizing non-core back-office tasks so that GSS organizations can focus on higher-value tasks for the stakeholders. The organizations that are leveraging intelligent automation can introduce valuable capabilities to the parent organization. This includes improving front-end customer interactions, increasing internal productivity, and realizing the digital strategies to fruition.

Automation can also help accelerate the streamlining of internal process management while assisting in the quick and efficient delivery of products and services to the customer. Most critically, intelligent automation of back-office imparts the organization with the ability to scale up or down as per the volatile market conditions or even pivot strategies. Therefore, leveraging digital to innovate and add agility becomes a no-brainer for primary businesses and GSS organizations alike. A successful collaboration between digitally empowered GSS and businesses looking to navigate the new normal will be a definitive way toward progress and building future business resilience.

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