Takeda Business Solutions – Growing a GBS Value Proposition – Transcript

Vanessa Gleason:

We talk in TBS about aspiration is to create an exceptional people experience. So for us within Takeda Business Solutions, what that means is rather than only looking at well how quickly can we deliver, how efficiently can we deliver, what is the cost profile, we actually put effectiveness first. How well do we actually provide that support so that essentially in the end, we’re delivering a support in an easy consumable way that it’s not going to create stress.

Announcer:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration^™ Podcast.” Week after week, you’ll hear from top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to Digital World Class® performance.

Philip King:

Hi, I’m Philip King, senior director at The Hackett Group and your host for today’s podcast, and my guest is Vanessa Gleason, global head of Takeda Business Solutions, which is the business services arm of Takeda, a global biopharmaceutical company. Takeda is a value-based biopharmaceutical company with a patient-centric R&D engine.

So I’m delighted to welcome you Vanessa and very happy you can be with us today. I was so impressed with your presentation at our European Best Practices Conference last year, and so I’m very excited to catch up again on your business solutions’ transformation efforts.

Vanessa Gleason:

Thank you, Phil. I’m very happy to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this all day actually, so happy to have the conversation.

Philip King:

So let’s start off with a few questions then, Vanessa. Thinking about global business services, which is my area, you were promoted to head of Takeda Business Solutions – the business solutions arm of Takeda – in August last year. You’ve been in Takeda Business Solutions since 2019. But what does business solutions mean, and what’s the scope of that? Why do you call it solutions?

Vanessa Gleason:

So I was promoted in August. It’s been a whirlwind few months since then, and we’ve been on an evolutionary journey since the Takeda Business Solutions team was set up back in 2019, and way back then we decided that we deliberately wanted to use the word “solutions” rather than services because we wanted to right from the start, set ourselves up as an enterprise organization – an enterprise organization that’s supporting the whole of Takeda with solutions, with support, with innovative different activities – and not start that relationship from a services mindset.

So we were thinking about how do we create a relationship with the rest of the business that is on a partnership basis, so that we understand strategically what the business is doing, and we can be part of those solutions that the business needs. So whatever the scope of the activity is that we’re performing – that we do it in the context of what the business actually needs.

So that was a very deliberate move right from the start, and we found that it really has helped us position ourselves as an equal partner in any conversation that we’re having with the business. So that services mindset is something that we sort of have a bit of a swear jar over here. If anyone ever says the word services, we correct ourselves immediately because it seems like a small thing, but it goes a long way in terms of the mentality and the way that we enter conversations with the business.

So the second part of your question, in terms of the scope of what we do, we really look across how we can define the activities that we provide to the organization. So whether that’s providing transactional solutions, whether that’s looking at reporting analytics, running transformational projects, digital implementations, and we really look at it from a capabilities perspective. And so deliberately, you’ll see I didn’t immediately say, well, the scope of TBS is HR, procurement and finance, which it is, but we deliberately don’t say it in those terms because we want to be more all-encompassing. And I feel if you speak in functional terms, then that’s quite limiting for the scope of a business solutions type organization, because your stakeholders immediately think that expertise associated with the content of those functions is the extent of what you can do as opposed to thinking about it in terms of the capability required to deliver those solutions.

Philip King:

Yeah, I really love the way you’re focused on capabilities. Linked to that, I know you are so really focused on the importance of alignment to Takeda’s overall strategy and purpose, which, of course, is very patient-centric. So can you elaborate on that and how it sort of works in practice? How do you get that translation through to the impact on patients?

Vanessa Gleason:

So the whole of the company – Takeda – we have a very strong purpose, which is making sure that we put the patient at the center of everything that we do, which means when we’re making decisions, how do we actually process those decisions? How do we think about the outcomes? So Takeda does have a values-based, decision-making model, which we call PTRB, which is patient, trust, reputation and business. And it’s in that order specifically. So it means that any decision you’re taking, your very first thought is, well, what is the impact here on the patient? How am I benefiting the patient, or how could I perhaps even negatively impact the patient – in which case you don’t even move on to the next areas of your decision-making process.

So for us in a solutions environment – in a support environment – of course, we’re not on a day-to-day basis dealing with those patients. So it can be an environment where you could easily forget. If you weren’t focused on ensuring that you are creating an environment that is focused on the patient, you could be just another generic support model anywhere. You could argue that HR is HR or finance is finance, and it’s agnostic to the type of industry that you’re in. And that’s not what we wanted to create. We really wanted to create an organization where people know that they are part of Takeda, and they feel a sense of belonging to a very long history – 200+ years of history – and very ingrained values that it feels different if you’ve worked in a shared services-type organization in another company, that you would come to Takeda – to TBS – and immediately think, “Hey, this feels very different because I understand why I am doing what I’m doing, and what the ultimate impact is on the patient.”

So what that means practically speaking is whatever activity we’re doing – so it could be let’s say processing invoices as a simple example or managing master data – is everyone in the TBS organization goes through an exercise to say, well, how does the work that I do ultimately impact the patient? So if I’m doing something late or perhaps if the quality’s not there, or if I’m not communicating with stakeholders throughout the end-to-end process chain, what could happen from a patient perspective? Am I impacting the speed at which they might access medicine, or am I creating additional time for someone in the R&D organization – research and development – who could potentially be creating life-saving medicines?

So having people really understand what the purpose is and how the work they do really does have an impact. We actually also have guest speakers from within the company that will spend time with our Takeda Business Solutions colleagues. And I always remember one of the speakers who was coming from our plasma-derived therapies organization, and she kept saying to us, what you do matters … what you do matters. And it’s really stuck in my head because I think it’s so important that any of us – no matter what industry we’re in or what work we do – we all want to feel that the work that we do matters. It’s hugely motivational, and I think that really helps us to create a community but also a common language with our stakeholders throughout the Takeda organization that we really do all have the same purpose. We’re all going in the same direction, and that creates common ground, which is hugely important I think when you’re working in a TBS-type scenario.

Philip King:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I was going to ask you actually how do you reinforce that and keep it top of mind? And sounds like those visits from people in the business really help. Are there any other sort of ways that you keep it reinforced?

Vanessa Gleason:

So, like I said, everyone goes through a process where they … we call it line of sight. So you think about, well, how does the work I do actually impact the patient in the end? So go through the end-to-end process steps. So where is this work I’m doing going? What could go wrong and therefore what is the potential benefit or impact? So everyone does that. We do have these regular sessions where we hear from stakeholders across the business, but also, I think something which is hugely impactful is we hear from actual patients – so real patients who are … they’re suffering from real diseases. They’re using Takeda’s medicines. They will come to sometimes virtual, but also sometimes in-person. They’ll visit our sites for Takeda Business Solutions and share their stories with us.

And you can imagine these are very emotional stories that really hit home. There’s no way that you could sit there with a dry eye sometimes and seeing those things firsthand. That is absolutely the most impactful thing you can imagine in terms of purpose for the team.

Philip King:

That’s brilliant. Really good. Thank you for that. So let’s move on into the area of automation, which you sort of covered in our Best Practices Conference presentation, but you put a different dimension onto it. Now I understand you are delivering automation and analytics as a capability really – not a service – as a capability, as a solution for the enterprise of Takeda. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey and the benefits, and how you’ve gone about that – maybe some lessons learned?

Vanessa Gleason:

Sure. So, I think there’s a couple of things. One is the actual implementation of different technology in the processes that we support within TBS, but I think the other is over the course of the last few years, ensuring that we are cultivating a digitally literate group of people within the Takeda Business Solutions space, which is also very important.

We want to have people in the organization. They don’t have to be technical experts, but know enough about the possible applications and capabilities within certain technologies such as generative AI that they can spot opportunities, that they can put their hand up and say, hey, I think there’s something here that we could do.

So we’ve had various sorts of education programs over the course of the last few years, which is really trying to democratize this knowledge and also encourage people to just from the ground up be involved in the conversation and have it – something that’s exciting – be curious and not create fear in the organization that technology is here to take away jobs. Well, no, technology is here to change jobs and to make jobs more interesting and allow us to move up the value chain in terms of the type of activities that we perform. So I think that’s one thing.

The other part around actually implementing new technologies is we’ve been very successful, I would say, in working with what we call data digital and technology organization, which is our IT partner within Takeda of really looking at what kinds of things can we apply in a TBS context and really setting us up so that as more things are coming down the pipeline in terms of generative AI, for example, that we are really well-placed to start to experiment with some of those things in partnership with DD&T.

Philip King:

I know you spoke in the presentation at the conference last year – you spoke about being a playground for Gen AI – what did you mean by that?

Vanessa Gleason:

The analogy I like to use is to say that a GBS organization is a playground. Meaning, if you think about the types of processes that would generally sit in a GBS organization and also so that the intersection of data – usually a GBS organization is pretty digitally savvy, digitally literate already, as well as some of the risk profile of the solutions that are provided – if you compare it in our context to activities that might be happening in an R&D organization or a commercial part of Takeda, the risk within a TBS organization is fairly low in terms of experimentation of a generative AI application.

So I see it as, with all those different characteristics, as a great place for an organization to actually start experimenting, playing, scaling. So the types of activities that you might look at within a GBS organization, if we take … the classic example is like help desk, right – support for queries, etc. If you can get that right within the GBS organization, you can scale that to multiple, multiple places across the rest of the organization – same capability, different content. But if you start with your GBS organization, it’s kind of a ripe place with the right characteristics for you to be successful on behalf of the rest of the organization. And that’s something that we’re now doing. So we’re working very closely with the IT part of Takeda – to look at various use cases that might start within TBS and perhaps with a relatively limited application within TBS, but with huge potential to then scale across the rest of the company.

Philip King:

Another thing that stood out for me when you spoke was that you said that we can do better than approach Gen AI just with a technology mindset. Digital tools on their own are not enough to drive value. Can you explain that? What does that mean for you in practice?

Vanessa Gleason:

Yeah, so I think that for me that came out of a place where I’d been sitting in lots of discussions with various leaders, and they would say, we’ll just get some generative AI stuff and put it on top. And I was thinking, gosh, we’re kind of thinking that this is going to be the answer to all of our dreams – all of our questions. But really generative AI is just the next iteration of what’s coming from a technology perspective. So before it was RPA and we’ve had other various iterations of technology, but we shouldn’t be treating this any differently. So thinking of the lessons that we’ve learned in the past, for example, do we have the right foundation from a data perspective? What do we need to think about from a compliance perspective? How do we reskill people and retrain people? Do we need additional roles, for example, to actually manage however this is going to look in the future?

So I think just by looking at it purely from a technology perspective, I don’t think that we’re going to be successful. I think we need to look at it more holistically and understand that the technology is always just an enabler to what we want to achieve.

Philip King:

Yeah, that’s right. And it’s really looking at that whole service delivery model, isn’t it? Any other sort of foundational prerequisites that you think are important to get the right platform to get value out of this digitization?

Vanessa Gleason:

We always talk about data – data quality – understanding what data we have access to. I think we all struggle with that. Across any different company you speak to, that’s always a challenge, but I also think it’s that mindset too that I was talking about that we’re trying to cultivate in TBS of this digital curiosity. Because if you try and implement any new kind of technology, there could be that resistance, but really the speed at which we’re all moving now. We don’t really have time for that. So if we can create that excitement around, well, what is this going to do for my job, and how is it going to be more exciting for me and how can I actually grow, then I think that really helps in terms of the speed of implementation and also acceptance from users.

Philip King:

Do you have any interesting use-case examples of Gen AI deployment so far, or piloting, or in production?

Vanessa Gleason:

I mentioned help desk. This is where it really queries. So this is something that we’re piloting with the IT organization, so within Takeda Business Solutions first. But as I said, the application could be much, much broader across the organization. So it could be really applied to any situation where you have a Q&A question being asked and answered – whether that’s a procurement help desk, whether that’s IT, whether that’s an HR solution, or in our case extended eventually to perhaps patient services queries from health care professionals.

So, as I said, a very broad potential in terms of the application, but it’s the technology itself and the way we manage content, the way we make sure that the responses are accurate, user-friendly, succinct, etc. That’s something that we can play with to go back to that playground analogy within TBS – learn, get it right, test it internally within the company, and then potentially apply it much more broadly in the future.

Philip King:

That sounds really exciting. Thanks for sharing that. A lot of my clients, they speak about improving the customer experience, but I know at Takeda, you talk about the people experience and it aligns with Takeda’s evolution, its brand, its aspirations, and there’s that strong emphasis on creating an exceptional people experience. Can you explain that? How it came about? What it means? How does that translate through to benefits for your stakeholders?

Vanessa Gleason:

There’s two ways really that this came about. So we talk in TBS about aspiration is to create an exceptional people experience, and it came from conversations that were happening at our executive level. So the executive level of Takeda where we’d done an employee experience survey. And one of the themes that had come out of that for the whole company was the theme of agility. And some of that, of course, relates to kind of intercompany processes, decision-making, how quickly people can work and how easily people can work. And so, at an enterprise level, this theme of agility became extremely important. So for us within Takeda Business Solutions, we thought, well, how do we make sure that the way that we work is reflecting the overall company imperatives in terms of this improving the agility. And so we put the people experience piece as part of our aspiration.

And what that means is rather than only looking at well, how quickly can we deliver, how efficiently can we deliver, what is the cost profile of the solutions that we support, that we actually put effectiveness first – effectiveness being how well do we actually provide that support. And so, from a cultural perspective, we started – this is probably two or two and a half years ago now – started to put people experience at the forefront. Meaning, if we were designing a new process, we’re implementing an even communications that may go out that have instructions to people on what they should be doing, training, something like that – that we would think about that people experience aspiration and weave it in right from the beginning.

So that essentially in the end, we’re delivering a support in an easy consumable way that people can … that it’s not going to create stress to use one of our processes that they can intelligently or intuitively understand what it is that they’re supposed to do. It’s easy to say it, but it’s not easy to actually infuse that into a culture. It does take time. And so I would say two and a half years in, we still have more opportunity to do even better, but I would say the reputation of TBS within Takeda, it has shifted to a place where I think we are now more and more recognized for providing a quality level of support as opposed to just that very transactional level of support that perhaps we were focused on in 2019 when we first started.

Philip King:

And I suppose that means that you also focus on the experience of your own people and your own teams in delivering the solutions, I guess, and try and make it easy for them as well.

Vanessa Gleason:

Yes. I mean, the term people is intended to be all-encompassing. So it’s not about customers. It’s not about employees. It’s not about suppliers. It’s about everyone all at once. So any people that are interacting, using, working within, it’s intended to encapsulate all of that.

Philip King:

Well, let’s just spend the last couple of minutes looking ahead if we can. I mean, you’ve been in the role since last August, but you had a bit of an apprenticeship since 2019. Looking ahead now, what do you see as the main opportunities and challenges, and how do you see things evolving in the next couple of years?

Vanessa Gleason:

I think for us, I started the conversation with you, Phil, talking about capabilities as opposed to that kind of traditional functional model. And for me, that really does represent the biggest area of opportunity. So my dream for Takeda and for TBS would be the principles that make a GBS organization attractive, which is obviously from an industry perspective, we started off thinking about cost and now we’re moving more toward technology and thinking about experience.

Those principles, I would love to see them embraced more broadly in organizations. So not necessarily meaning that a GBS organization has to be huge, but no, it’s the principle of what actually makes sense in terms of thinking end to end, in terms of centralization, in terms of applying technology or footprint, or all of these tools or levers that we have at our disposal in a GBS organization. They shouldn’t be restricted to a GBS organization. Why not apply those same tools to any part of a company where it would benefit?

So I would love to see that becoming more pervasive across different organizations and not just limited to that sort of traditional functional scope. And I know some GBS organizations obviously have a lot more, but generally still limited to those traditional functions. It may be including IT and others, but the principles can be applied to any of those capabilities or types of activities across a company. So I still think there’s a lot of opportunity out there where companies can learn from what a GBS organization may have started and just apply it within those other parts of an organization.

Philip King:

Yeah, that’s great. And sounds like you’re on a bit of a mission there. Vanessa, thank you so much. It’s been a very, very enjoyable conversation. I love that focus on capabilities and solutions, so I thank you on behalf of The Hackett Group, and wish you and all the team all the best for the coming future years. Best wishes for continuous success, and thanks again very much. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation today.

Vanessa Gleason:

Thank you so much for having me, Phil. I enjoyed it.

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