The newspaper "The Moscow Times"
For many an enterprise quality and cost of non-core business functions are the cause of eternal irritation and conflicts.
Your business is an exception? Just ask your personal assistant. What does he or she think about your Finance and Accounting people? Or IT? Or call-center? Are they helpful? Are they are ready to solve the problems? So? What does your PA say? What? You dare not use such words in a decent company?
Very often though such services are called ‘supporting', very little support you get from them.
An employee that has a question regarding the payroll or wants your Accounting to pay for the materials is given a gibberish instruction ‘get-a-number-of-approvals-may-be-we-will-pay'. When he calls to IT support, the latter lets the user understand how incompetent he is. Why has the user to be competent in using software? Why can't the IT provide an intuitive interface? It's an enigma.
Not any supporting department has the power to terrorize the business.
There should be at least two parameters for that:
- Complexity and science-likeness of the expertise that the service possesses. Everybody can do marketing and football (at least so they say), but none will ever try to count the balance of his or her own free will.
- The processes that the department handles are business-critical. (You know how much an accounting mistake may cost, and this is not all about money).
The fear of the unknown, of the consequences of a mistake makes a manager an easy victim of any claims from such a department.
Accounting needs two more employees, the IT demands a new server. Cost and number of personnel of the supporting services increase annually. Will the expenses be cost-efficient? Why the department doesn't cope with the tasks in time and in budget? What was reason for the failure of the project? Were there objective causes or was it your employees mistakes?
How to make head or tail of it?
- Benchmarking is the first answer. Count, count and compare. You even don't need regular reports, just ask a friend how many people do payroll in his company? The number of accountants is equal to yours while his company is twice smaller? Congratulations! And how big is IT support? The same as yours, and they support SAP system that you are only planning to integrate? H-mm, you have to think over it.
- Ask your employees to estimate the supporting services. Your client estimates your company buying or abstaining from the purchase. If you get more, you it's the best appraisal you can get from the customer. Your internal service departments also have a client. It's your employee.
Than make the employees' appraisal a part of the supporting department KPI.
Of course not all the marks assigned to the service department by your employees would be fair. Some of the people may be offended or prejudiced. But not all 5000 employees. If everyone has a grudge against your inner service, may be, there's something wrong about the service?
Don't forget to modernize your request system. Introduce a point ‘estimate the performance' in the request form. - Outsource your non-core business processes, or parts of them. In this way you will not have to organize the department's work and control it, you can forget about the risks – the outsourcer will be take the responsibility for the legislation compliance. However to make the best of outsourcing you have to set the task correctly, and it might not be easy as it takes expertise in the service in question.
- Norms and standards. SLA (Service Level Agreement) is not meant for external providers only. Set the deadlines for documents' approval, user request closure, set a standard for a number of operations per minute.
Of course, not for every industry you can find such norms. Sometimes they are closely connected with your company features. Let's say, financial analysis will be ready much faster if you have an ERP system rather than if you have not.
However there are several methods of for setting the labour norms, ‘working day photo' is one of them. In this case a consultants spends several days with your employees registering all their activities. On the observations basis the consulting company will make the recommendations regarding the labour efficiency at your enterprise and propose the labour norms. - Audit, internal or external. You can audit the performance of the department or just several processes it supports (HR administration, IT infrastructure). It will help you to understand how well the processes are organized, if they meet the legislation requirements and what you can improve.
But the best way to secure your non-core business processes is, of course, to find the best people for them. People you can trust. Trust but verify – the rule goes both for people and money.
By Ludmila Shusterova, Deputy General Director, Marketing and Business Development
Outsourcing Division BDO Russia
