Global Process Owners (GPOs) are responsible for directing and managing the end-to-end A/R process within a Global Business Service (GBS) organization. End-to-end often entails cross-functional scope as A/R involves collaborating with multiple departments. GPOs analyze the efficiency, quality, and transformation of the A/R process in GBS that has been influenced by technological and infrastructure developments. They create an effective and efficient process, implementing it with the right human, financial, and technological resources, and providing quality outcomes as required by the organization.

The responsibilities of a GPO are varied but can be broadly categorized into
three areas:

Process related responsibilities

GPOs must define the required processes, map them into the required outputs, standardize and drive for continuous improvement by implementing, monitoring, and measuring process improvement initiatives.

Stakeholder management

GPOs must be able to manage both top management and the employees in the GBS organization. The employees in the GBS organization need to be trained regularly to refresh their knowledge and to prep them for new processes or technologies. Top leadership should be kept in a continuous loop to get buy-in at required levels.

Monitoring team performance

The GPO is the end-to-end process owner and is responsible for the process’s health. A process will function smoothly without any roadblocks only if the team performs in a seamless manner. Setting team KPIs and measuring their performance against accepted top metrics in a timely manner will help GPOs to ensure better process performance.

Apart from these GPOs are also tasked with:

• Leveraging data for making value-driven decisions
• Building a digital enterprise to achieve scalable growth

The GPO’s role is an integral part of any shared service model as they are key players in driving value across the process and by large the organization. To make their process world-class, a GPO must possess 5 critical skills.

In this ebook, we will study in brief the importance of each of these skills and how global organizations leverage them to create a best-in-class A/R process.

Michael Pettyjohn
Director, Customer Financial Services
Danone

In order to scale, it is essential to think beyond just customary benefits and focus more on value-additions including efficiency, customer satisfaction, and improved A/R health. GPOs need to think about the bigger picture to drive global process standardization and continuous improvement for scalable and future-ready O2C processes. Hence, it is imperative to have a long-term vision and plan.

Danone’s long-term vision: Transform A/R by improving accuracy, speed and eliminating costs

Danone defined their long-term vision for their order to cash process as the following.

• Integrating data with a single source of truth
• Single platform for all A/R processes
• Cloud-based SaaS solution for easy implementation
• User-friendly and easy to train the workforce

Danone’s method of leveraging long-term vision

Based on the defined long-term vision, Danone identified their solution requirements for automating cash application and deduction management.

Cash Application

• Handle multiple remittance formats
• Automatically identify deductions based on internal codes
• Configure output based on specific requirements for different company codes
• Easy to deploy across different business units

Deduction Management

• Automate collection of claims and POD backup documents from customer websites
• Automate the processing of trade deductions (85% of all deductions)
• Track deduction case progress through the resolution lifecycle
• Automate approval/denial correspondence with customer

Tracie Duncan
Director of Credit, A/R & Collections
Adidas

Process complexity is a significant driver of increasing process costs. The more complex the process, the slower it is to execute, and expensive to maintain. Furthermore, governing compliance is difficult to establish and monitor, especially as regional variations push up against global standardization. Hence, before starting on the journey for any standardization or digitization, GPOs need to have an in-depth process understanding.

Adidas identified the importance of in-depth process knowledge and they used
it to drive the digital transformation of their A/R shared services.

Challenges in Adidas: Disconnected systems

Adidas had disparate systems for processes across credit, collections,
deductions, billing, and payments. This led to:

• Productivity loss because of low-value manual coordination across teams
• Broken customer experience by interfacing with different systems
• Concerns about maintaining a single source of truth with SAP

The Adidas way of leveraging in-depth process knowledge

Adidas’s in-depth understanding of the process led them to define their requirements from technology very clearly. The vision was defined as “Digital Enablement with Integrated Receivables” and aimed at two core objectives.

• Enable digital collaboration between A/R teams
• Drive adoption of e-invoicing and e-payments

Their processes were siloed, and in order to move away from that approach, the following plan was laid out.

• One vendor to establish a simplified IT landscape across credit-to-cash
• Handle subsidiary operations through a single system
• Enforce tight ERP integration to maintain a strong, single source-of-truth
• Leverage automation to eliminate low-value manual tasks across the Credit-to-Cash (CTC) process

Gunther Smets
Order to Cash GPO
Cargill

Data-Driven decision-making leads to greater transparency and accountability. It fosters continuous process improvement and provides consistency with decision-making. A GPO who takes decisions without strong data backing is prone to make poor decisions at high costs and with negligible results.

Cargill’s O2C GPO also faced a similar situation before finalizing the technology they wanted to implement in their A/R process.

Challenges in Cargill: Complex IT landscape

Cargill was present in more than 70 countries across the world with no centralized master data and they had a total of

• 5 enterprises
• 20 business groups
• 28 JDE instances
• 5 SAP instances
• 90+ proxy CTC applications
• 50+ ERPs

This was a tough situation as every unit had a decentralized approach and when they tried to ‘lift+shift’ to a centralized shared service model, they realized the lack of an integrated platform. That’s when they decided to opt for a ‘lift+transform+shift’ strategy.

Cargill’s way of utilizing data-driven decision making

Cargill understood that they had to analyze the maturity gaps in their process and select technology based on that. To find the maturity gaps, they used a three-step process.

Molly Pryor
Assistant Treasurer
Huntsman

Transforming A/R processes for different BUs spread across different geographies is complicated. The lack of proper planning and a detailed roadmap for execution is a recipe for disaster. Hence, GPOs need to lay strategic roadmaps for project implementation in order to:

• Avoid any risk fallouts
• Keep all stakeholders involved
• Streamline implementation and deployment of the solution

Challenges in Huntsman: Disintegrated systems, non-standardized processes, and more

The challenges in Huntsman were many. It ranged from multiple disintegrated systems to the unavailability of real-time data. The credit reviews were cumbersome and the teams were riddled with time-consuming, redundant manual processes. This in turn led to

• Lack of visibility and transparency
• Lack of integration between cross-functional teams
• Limited support for critical decision making

Huntsman realized that they needed to transform their A/R process to address these bottlenecks and decided to automate their O2C function.

Huntsman’s way of employing planned project implementation

The deployment model of Huntsman was a well-planned approach. They deployed solutions for credit management, collections, and deductions within 2 years in business units spread across four regions – LatAm, US, Europe, and Asia. They followed a five-step methodology for deployment.

Post-deployment, Huntsman’s overall O2C metrics improved along with process transparency and visibility.

Inga Occorso
Financial Manager, A/R Operations
McCormick

New process implementation based on unfamiliar technology such as RPA and AI undoubtedly results in kickback from most of the functional workers due to:

• Lack of information
• Insecurity around the job
• Inability to understand the new method

Hence, GPOs must have robust change management plans and influential skills to smoothen the technology adoption rate.

McCormick’s way of addressing challenges with a robust change management plan

These are the 5 skills that helped Adidas, Cargill, Huntsman, McCormick, and Danone transform their Order to Cash operations for the better. Here is a quick overview of the 5 skills.

• Long-term vision from Danone
• In-depth process and business acumen from Adidas
• Data-driven decision making from Cargill
• Project implementation planning from Huntsman
• Change management from McCormick

Following the footsteps of these GBS leaders will enable your businesses to tackle some of the most common challenges specific to shared services and help you in your journey to achieve Order to Cash transformation.