The BDO Unicon Outsourcing company attended the "Global Business Services (GBS) and the role of СFO" roundtable held by the ACCA international association (The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants). The participants discussed the growth, throughout the world, of the popularity of the GBS model and its perspectives in our country, its effects on the functioning of companies, the preparedness of the common servicing centers of Russia's companies for transition to GBS and the transformations of financial services related to it.
According to all the contributors, the very idea of Global Business Services is still new to our country. Despite that Russia's entrepreneurs have already begun looking closer at this model, while it has been actively striking root in the West, the term GBS may still be hardly found in Russian language sources.
In order to better understand what makes GBS different from other organizational models, the attendees of the roundtable compared several such models: the standard one (organizations having several independent business support centers, each headed by the financial director, HR director, IT director, etc.), Shared Service Centers (certain servicing functions are singled out among all organizations' processes and are done by the common center, headed by one person) and the Global Business Services model. The latter is, in fact, an improved version of the Shared Service Center and means bringing all non-key functions, such, for instance, as finance, IT and purchasing, together in one organizational unit. Supposedly, this approach may increase the efficiency of the supporting services, while all companies' efforts are concentrated on achieving the end result, significant for business.
However, companies deciding to switch to the Global Business Services model face a lot of problems. They need to increase the degree of automation, unify uncoordinated informational services and databases throughout their departments located in various countries and regions and modify their approach to the development of their employees. Besides, such companies must be prepared to bring separately located centers together in one multifunctional center and contemplate the consolidation of service providers who will have to work under unified conditions.
Representatives of Russia's largest companies and outsourcing service providers shared their views of the current situation, the prospects of the development of GBS and practical experiences. Dmitry Kovalenko, director of the department of accounting practices of BDO Unicon Outsourcing, related his opinion of the professional competency, skills and qualities needed by specialists capable of transiting companies to the Global Business Services model.
According to him, the GBS model should be more attractive to personnel from the viewpoint of career growth than the USC (unified cervices centers) model. It gives people a chance to develop themselves in related spheres, while the fields of work and, consequently, the possibilities of skills improvement of USC personnel are strictly limited. This situation inevitably increases the personnel turnaround of USC centers. At the same time, the GBS model requires that employees have certain professional skills and personal qualities, first of all those related to project management, communications, the ability to see the whole picture and the adaptability to foreign cultures. Consultative skills and cross-disciplinary competence become very important for employees who have to very well understand their roles within whole processes rather than separate functions. They need analytic abilities and being business-oriented.
This model presents certain difficulties for human resources services. Firstly, on the market, the number of qualified candidates is very limited. Secondly, this approach requires extremely complicated "logistics" and personnel management systems oriented towards finding and stimulating key personnel. Also, many participants of the discussion agreed that the best heads of GBS centers are financial directors because CFOs, even within the limits of their present activities, need the understanding of all internal processes of their companies as related to the whole business and not just individual functions.
Yet despite all the difficulties and the number of wide-scale objectives entrepreneurs still have to cope with in order to introduce the new model, Global Business Services is the next logical step on the way to completed evolution of the support services within companies. One may count on that GBS centers will gradually begin to occupy an important place in large Russian and international organizations.
