Many firms, particularly embedded services delivery organizations, struggle to manage the interaction between the sales department and the services delivery organization. If you're not careful, introducing a customer success function into the mix would certainly confuse the relationship even more.
Organizations are under a lot of pressure to be financially nimble, to lead their people and cultural aspects, to standardize and globalize operations, to consumerize service experiences, and to decrease expenses. In order to handle these new difficulties, corporate activities that provide internal services must become more business-oriented. The ideal functional organization is commonly described using terms like "planned," "business partner," "expandable," and "value-added services."
Is it possible to fulfill these requests? While it may look impossible to be more business-oriented, globally integrated, and service-oriented while lowering operating expenses, many companies have discovered that it is possible. The objective is to drastically change how corporate services are given to customers while also embracing technology.
Corporate function organizations have traditionally been designed as either centralized or decentralized organizations, depending on the company. Centralized corporations have traditionally produced products and services from a corporate-centric perspective, with expenditures allocated to business unit consumers. Decentralized groups have reported directly to the business unit and have concentrated on their own particular demands.
The streamlined model benefits from economies of scale, standardized procedures, and functional specialists, but it does so in an environment where the client has limited control over product and service mix, quality, quantity, responsiveness, and price.
The decentralized model addresses these drawbacks by granting control of the function to the business units, but costs often rise as economies of scale are lost and consistency suffers. The benefits and drawbacks of various organizational models have resulted in a constant transition from centralized to decentralized and back without a truly viable method of delivering products and services.
Many firms have been transforming their product and service delivery frameworks in order to solidify the best service delivery These new product and service delivery models rely on centralized aspects to generate economies of scale and process consistency, as well as decentralized elements to maintain a balance between quantity, service level, and price. More crucially, instead of aligning products and services by function, this hybrid delivery model aligns them by work characteristics (e.g., administrative, procedural, programming, expert, advisory, or strategic; selectively or widely applied; continuous or event-driven) (payroll, procurement, IT, benefits, staffing, or employee relations). For the customer, the end result is functional products and services that are supplied to many constituencies in the most efficient manner possible. Costs are lower for the company, and service value is higher.
Below mentioned are the Channels of the service Delivery Model
- Business Unit Support/Advisement to Business
The business-facing group in most delivery models is responsible for delivering distinctive, customer-specific products and services. These are services specific to that business unit, such as HR workforce planning or organizational design, or finance forecasting and budgeting. The services are more strategic in nature and are intended to improve the business unit's operating outcomes. This group is often staffed by mid-to senior-level generalists with a breadth of functional knowledge due to its concentration on high-value-added consulting and advisory services. The operating unit's management is usually this group's primary customer. HR business partners, generalists, and, on occasion, Hr leaders provide support for local requirements that cannot be consolidated in HR. Senior analysts committed to the business usually make up business unit support in accounting.
- Centers of Expertise
When the service center requires assistance to answer a question or complete a transaction, it usually turns to the COEs. COEs are a collection of policy and program-focused functional experts who can be deployed throughout the company. Many COEs in HR, for example, include disciplines like talent acquisition, remuneration, benefits, talent management, and/or employee relations. COEs for financial planning and analysis, performance reporting and analytics, budgeting, treasury and tax, pricing, and audit are common in finance. COEs for global procurement/planning, inventory management, and contract and supplier management may be found in the supply chain.
These skills are utilized throughout the organization and provide programmatic assistance to the business unit support function and the service center. Again, the philosophy is that centralizing these expertise-based operations makes more commercial sense than duplicating resources inside each of the operating divisions. Of course, the delivery channels must be integrated for the model to be successful in the end. While standards and programs may be coordinated centrally through a COE, administrative assistance would be provided by the service center, and field support and operating unit management would be crucial in some operations.
- Corporate
A small corporate finance group creates the financial direction and strategy for the company, establishes financial regulations, and offers financial oversight in most finance models. Financial strategy, financial policy, mergers and acquisitions, and control/compliance are some of the services supplied by corporate finance. In general, corporate finance and F&A COEs cater to separate audiences. Corporate finance serves the entire company, whereas COEs cater to specific business units or divisions.
The pressure for corporate support groups to cut costs and offer strategic value has increased. The functions can achieve these objectives by successfully adopting and implementing the new delivery model.
We at Centum learning understand Organizations that have effectively implemented this strategy have seen a 20% to 40% reduction in total operating costs and an increase in function to company personnel ratios. Furthermore, while most businesses were forced to adopt the model due to financial constraints, many claim that the greatest benefit is improved service levels, owing to the alignment of critical resource competencies with specific kinds of work.
The strain on corporate support operations will increase as the business environment becomes more challenging. The best service delivery model has the potential to allow these regions to continue to bring significant value to the business at a lower cost than traditional centralized or decentralized delivery methods.
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