World’s leadingGLOBAL INFORMATION SERVICEScompany achieves cost optimization and

operational excellence throughGLOBAL SHARED

SERVICES

CLIENT BACKGROUNDThe client is a market-leading global information services company. Professionals in the areas of legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and healthcare rely on their leading information-enabled tools and software solutions to manage business efficiently, deliver results to their clients, and succeed in an ever more dynamic world.

The company’s 2011 annual revenues were €3.4 billion, it employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide, and maintains operations across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. Its shares are quoted on Euronext Amsterdam and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices.

World’s leadingGLOBAL INFORMATION SERVICEScompany achieves cost optimization and

operational excellence throughGLOBAL SHARED

SERVICES

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In today’s global scenario, Business Information Service (BIS) providers are experiencing multi-pronged challenges, while meeting the growing demands of customers for personalized and value-added content. Content commoditization, its wide-spread availability and multi-channel/ media delivery also add to the existing complexities.

In this demanding scenario, the client intended to continue its global expansion, improve time-to-market, reduce operational costs, and leverage the benefits of global scale, standards, and technology partnerships, and ultimately enable business transformation.

However, this was a huge challenge, as they had a decentralized and federated back office structure that led to the duplication of processes, non-standardized and overlapping IT systems and lack of standardized tools. Also, the IT decision-making was fractured/ region-specific and not aligned with the overall IT strategy of the organization.

To enable centralization, economies of scale and operational efficiencies, the Global Shared Services (GSS) division was set up in 2009. GSS was designed to provide unified services to business units in the areas of technology, sourcing, procurement, legal, finance, and human resources. It supported the company’s strategy of ‘Maximizing value for customers’, by raising innovation and effectiveness and achieving global scale. The mandate was to achieve operational efficiencies for software development and testing, content production, and other BPO functions where productivity improvements and increasing levels of quality could be achieved.

However, to enable these efficiencies and ultimately drive transformation, the GSS group needed to be integrated and consolidated, providing a single view of business operations and centralizing them to gain efficiencies. The client’s existing GSS organization was small, fragmented, and with limited BU participation, leading to limited global leverage, cost take-out and efficiencies of scale.

This prevented them from responding swiftly to rapidly changing global business needs.

ENGAGEMENT MANDATESThe company intended to restructure and grow GSS operations by moving from a federated BU-centric model to a centralized shared pool, this would not only lead to cost and operational benefits, but the savings could then be re-invested into transformational projects.

They required a strategic partner with a global presence to help centralize their back office staff and offshore application development, maintenance, and support activities in order to drive key benefits/ ‘Core Objectives’:

• Achieving business agility - Through closer alignment of IT services to their GSS and business needs.

• Consolidation and standardization – Consolidate de-centralized services and standardize processes, tools and service levels to gain economies of scale, operational excellence and efficiencies.

• Cost reduction - Increase financial efficiencies and reduce the existing IT spend (which was above industry benchmarks).

In particular the twin expected mandates were across two areas:

• Core Application Management outsourcing: Reduced application management and development costs by leveraging increased offshoring and centers of excellence and establishing clearly defined SLAs. Also, reduced TCO and increased agility by migrating towards a single SAP instance/ platform across the globe.

• Business Transformation: Providing an increased level of service to internal and external customers, with individual/ team performance indicators, closely aligned to business processes and the strategic objectives of the client.

This would be enabled by reducing the cost of financial operations by implementing best practices/ business processes in regional/ global shared services and increased business agility through consistent global business processes.

The client sought a partner with:

- Global reach and play to facilitate the IT back office operational transformation, bring in robust industry-standard processes, and reap assured cost savings every year through the effective use of global service delivery and offshoring. These savings would be ploughed back to enable business transformation.

- But more importantly, they desired a partner to help define a roadmap for the business transformation of its Back-office IT operations – through the consolidation and simplification of the IT landscape and introduction of enhanced service capabilities to support its customers.

AREAS OF ENGAGEMENTThe client and HCL entered into a strategic partnership for a period of five years. This partnership would enable the development, support and maintenance of its back office applications across the IT landscape globally.

HCL’s scope included:

• Development and support of all back office applications globally.

• Enablement of a Global Shared Services model (centralized services for application support and development, standardized platforms, tools and processes and service levels).

• Better alignment of IT strategy with overall business goals.

- This partnership was based on HCL’s deep expertise in managing large transformational deals, as well as its rich and diverse experience in enabling

Business Aligned Transformation for several leading media and publishing companies.

- HCL effectively mapped the challenges faced by the client through a joint discovery phase for as-is operations, gained a clear understanding of the current state of their IT services (people, process, tools, and SLAs), and identified potential areas of improvement.

- HCL proposed a comprehensive solution that addressed the business and operational transformation of back office IT (application), enablement and growth of its Global Shared Services, and assured realization of year-on-year cost reduction.

- HCL is supporting around 200 applications (150 in Managed Care mode) as part of the engagement across ERP, CRM, HRM, e-Commerce, BI and Middleware among many others.

- HCL touches almost all overlying business processes such as Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, Hire to Retire, Finance and Accounting, Sales and Distribution, etc. HCL supports a total of 24 business units spanning North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

HCL DIFFERENCE • During the provider selection phase, HCL differentiated itself as a global IT

services vendor with a rich experience in handling large applications based engagements on a global scale. The client was looking for a partner who could understand their unique business and IT challenges, and had the breadth of services/ depth of practice to address these challenges.

• HCL executed its ‘Discovery’ of the client’s current applications landscape in a flawless manner, leading to a full understanding of the organizational and technological hurdles that faced the customer.

• HCL proposed an effective and graduated Target Operating Model, based on institutionalization/ standardization of all major processes and tools. It derived horizontal depth from HCL’s Centers of Excellence, whereas HCL Transformation services supported the portfolio optimization, Enterprise architecture and SOA/ BPM initiatives in the steady state.

• HCL leveraged its well established MaSCoT framework to propose ‘Managed Care’ services with proven fundamentals, demonstrating HCL’s capability in providing SLA based services, with cost predictability.

• HCL approached the critical transition activity with care and sensitivity and proposed a ‘Wave’ approach in order to minimize transition related risks across various geographies and Business Units. HCL proposed a judicious mix of re-badging and replacement of employees, in line with the client’s need to retain SME knowledge.

• HCL had a proven record of enabling Global Shared Services for many well-known clients in exactly similar contexts, thus further creating a good fit for the current engagement.

• HCL’s familiarity with the client’s business issues, processes and systems ensured a stronger and more streamlined engagement experience.

• HCL’s strong M&E practice, domain and technology strengths and product/ solution partnerships with several leading industry players played a key role.

HCL’s media and entertainment practice:

- Over 13 years of experience with more than 6,000 people and deep domain competencies, helping customers leverage latest industry insights and trends.

- Strong co-creation model with key customers and vertical partners.

- Innovation in outsourcing through customizable business models, delivery approaches, service standards, and processes and methodologies for effective cost optimization.

- Technology centers of excellence which include Enterprise Applications,BI/ DW, CRM/ Salesforce.com, Internet/ web technologies and mobility.

- Key partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, EMC, Tibco and a host of micro-vertical focused partnerships.

BUSINESS BENEFITSHCL worked to deliver several key outcomes for the client. This, while boosting operational efficiencies and bringing in cost optimizations, also ensured reinvestment of savings into the business to drive transformational projects within the company, thus contributing to their strategic objectives.

The business benefits achieved were:

• Substantial cost reduction over the deal term.

• Faster turnaround of requests and hence higher CSAT due to standardized processes and tool sets.

• Additional cost savings are also expected from the streamlining and integration of the client’s federated landscape into a consolidated structure, through the standardization of tools and consolidation of around 33 core processes such as demand management, budgeting, etc.

• Transformation: HCL is working with the client to transform e-Commerce, ERP, BI, CRM, and ensure integration across its business units/ geographies. Also, Business Aligned IT led collaborative efforts between the two organization’s architecture groups will yield long term results to fuel business growth.

KEY SUCCESS FACTORSSome key points that have worked well for this relationship are:

• HCL implanted a seamless zero business disruption transition, leveraging HCL’s state-of–the-art transition framework (ASSeT) as a part of the Managed Services Model MaSCoT™.

This resulted in the following benefits for the client:

- Reduced IT intensity.

- Achieved predictable cost through application based pricing for support and pricing based on Industry Standard Estimation Methodologies for application development.

- Gained access to the best of breed tools at a reduced cost.

- Freed up management bandwidth to focus on core business.

- Enabled improvement in processes by leveraging the mature processes (CMMi/ITIL) of the vendor.

- Enabled the creation of a knowledge management framework.

- Gained from productivity levers (YoY improvements).

- Delivered to agreed SLAs and OLAs.

• HCL performed a gap analysis with respect to the client’s current IT operations and planned to address them in order to achieve their IT and business goals.

• HCL institutionalized the Target Operating Model for the client with clearly defined processes, standard tooling architectures and a well-documented SLA regime.

• HCL enabled a “seamless and zero business disruption oriented” transition plan and achieved timely transition.

• HCL enabled business agility for them through its Demand Management framework which utilized industry standards and tools in tandem with a rules engine that was agreed to, by the customer.

• HCL succeed in establishing an integrated delivery structure across the two organizations, successfully dealing with the complexities that arose from multiple business units/ diverse IT landscapes.

• HCL effectively managed and implemented Organization Change Management initiatives.

• HCL defined core delivery and performance metrics for the engagement. These metrics work towards improving process and people efficiencies, measuring and tracking goals and ultimately help in defining a Managed Services model.

• Establishment of a centralized IT Governance model with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for GSS, the client’s BUs and HCL.

Hello,  I’m  from  HCL!  We  work  behind  the  scenes,  helping  our  customers  to  shift paradigms  and  start  revolutions.  We  use  digital  engineering  to  build  superhuman capabilities. We make sure that the rate of progress far exceeds the price. And right now, 90,000  of  us  bright  sparks  are  busy  developing  solutions  for  500  customers  in  31 countries across the world. How can I help you?

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