The Hackett Group's Global Business Services (GBS) Advisory program addresses the strategy development, and the operating model components across the general and administrative (G&A) service delivery model - including transactional shared services and centers of excellence managed both in house and by third-party (Business Process Outsourcing) providers.
The Hackett Group's GBS program is designed for the executive with overall responsibility for support service delivery. Membership provides you with the information you need to optimize your service delivery and to quickly adapt to changing business conditions. With advisor access, performance metrics and best practices available through the Member Center and Book of Numbers™ research, you can quickly asses how well your organization performs and accelerate your journey to peak performance.
One of the most important cost savings practices for an efficient G&A service delivery model is having a robust transaction engine, often referred to as a shared services organization. The shared services trend has been in place for 15-plus years and has been responsible for many millions of dollars in saving and processing improvements, but the shared services concept is now taking on a new level of importance for G&A organizations. During the past three to five years, shared services organizations have been making some dramatic changes and are being retooled and rebranded to a more progressive concept, called Global Business Services (GBS).
The name says a lot about what is going on: Deployment in a truly global context that both utilizes expanded geographic scope and takes advantage of labor arbitrage; business in the context of taking on a broader scope of activities and becoming more integrated with the actual workings of the enterprise instead of being pushed off into the corner of the organization, breaking through functional boundaries; and a service orientation in terms of a culture and performance attitude that were not always present in the early shared services movement.
Building a GBS organization needs to be into a bigger context. It is more than creating a shared infrastructure and understanding management reporting lines. It is one part of more holistic approach to defining the strategy and execution plan for the entire G&A organization. For each G&A process the question needs to be asked, who should be doing this work, where should it be done and how? The answer to this question is a central element of the G&A Service Delivery Strategy and define the future state G&A Service Delivery Model.
