Beyond the traditional role of providing transactional services in mid-and back-office functions, mature GBS organizations are leveraging the process management and digital transformation expertise they have mustered to become an in-house Enterprise Process Improvement advisor and executor.

To be successful, GBS needs to curate and collaborate with an ecosystem of partners, including businesses, GPOs, consultants, systems, service providers, etc.

We made some observations along our client journeys that can be summarized in four pillars as described below:

1. Design
   • The mantra of shared services standardization needs to be re-examined when tackling customer-facing processes to achieve a healthy balance of global and local processes, optimize business value and customer experience.
   • GBS should champion end-to-end process integration, partly because they are the internal victim of siloed and broken processes.
   • Judicial placement of part of the processes with outsourcing partners can improve operational efficiency and resilience drastically.
2. Tools
   • All the process mining and modeling, intelligent automation, and analytics tools applied to manage the traditional back-office functions can be repurposed to improve additional enterprise processes.
   • It is important to leverage external partners for specific processes and technical know-how.
3. Mindset
   • The engrained Lean Six Sigma culture in GBS will prove to be an asset when targeting additional enterprise processes.
   • Operation cost is no longer the predominant consideration. GBS needs to shake off the back-office mentality and capture value creation opportunities aggressively.
   • Focus on internal and external customer experience will not only yield long-term value but also enable trusting relationships.
4. Change
   • Change management is arguably the most important tool as GBS organizations branch out of back-office processing roles.
   • This is where experienced professionals can add the most value. Meanwhile, GBS should also invest in internal change management capabilities along with a change agent network throughout the enterprise.

With the scale and scope of operations, GBS can improve additional enterprise processes through process management. To be successful, GBS needs to leverage digital transformation to curate and collaborate with an ecosystem of partners, including businesses, GPOs, consultants, systems, service providers, etc.