GPO: A Step Towards The Future

From the past few years, we have seen the emergence of a new business strategy in global companies and organizations, which is appointing a single-point owner – the Global Process Owner or GPO. This modern approach is about assigning ownership to an individual over an end-to-end process across any geographical and business units. This procedure brings up a new strategic corner related to the domain of finance & accounting, technology, people, business process, and performance.

Having a centralized organizational model, leveraging shared services, improving process standardization, enhancing accountability, and bench-marking performance for company standards are some of the key leads behind the GPO approach.

As the entire Order-to-Cash cycle of a company is split into several stages, it leads to adding up the multiple functional silos and geographical units to it. Hence, it becomes process-intensive and requires a great deal of maintenance with visibility and accountability.

About Cargill

Cargill is a team of 160,000 professionals spread over 70 countries drawing together the worlds of food, agriculture, nutrition, and risk management. With over 153 years of experience, Cargill is building towards a sustainable future with new technologies and insights.

Cargill’s journey towards a GPO approach

From a global process owner perspective, there are four critical components related to finance, mainly focusing on Credit to Cash-

• People: This is the component where Cargill defines what kind of work to do, where to do and leveraging their shared service centers. In this component, not only does the company focus on the shift of a shared service model, but also towards a regional approach than a business approach.
• Process: It works on developing different business processes and frameworks. Process standardization is highly focused on proper process documentation to avoid issues during migration.
• Data: The company deals with defining a master data or governing model to maintain data definition and quality standards. In a single statement, it means having a separate golden account for each customer from all the different systems.
• Technology: It defines technical capabilities to deliver standardized processes. This is about rationalizing the current technology landscape and replacing it with a better one.

The single Accounts & Finance landscape of Cargill

Cargill revamped the Accounting and Finance scenario into a single frame. Indeed, the Global Process Owner Approach is an integral part of achieving a unique A&F landscape by Cargill. It is all about how Cargill shifted their A&F scenario towards a shared service organization.
The critical components of their finance and accounting landscape are:

• Global Process Organization: Standardized processes across the regions and CBS centers to help enable core capabilities.
• Global Finance Platform: GFP enables the standardization of operations and the functioning of the integrated A&F operating model.
• CBS Finance: Cargill Business Services Finance, Install a culture of continuous improvement to enable agility and growth of the A&F function
• Regional A&F: An A&F function aligned by regions and enabled by the CBS centers to provide quality service to our businesses.

By imparting the complete authority to a single individual to navigate swiftly through their business standards, global companies have indeed reported the substantial advantages associated with their overall financial goals.

Cargill stepped above and accepted the comprehensive enhancements of a GPO, dealing with aspects where components related to finance and order-to-cash cycle gave way to rationalizing their processes and enabling standardization. With all considered, Cargill drove an overall finance transformation project and has migrated 3600 employees in 3 years into six global centers without dropping the ball on any of the metrics.