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Global Business Services & Sourcing

Improving client satisfaction through fast, accurate, and consistent service at scale
We support organizations on end-to-end journeys to develop their global business-services and -sourcing programs, including shared-services strategy, setup, scale-up, and shared-services transformation through next-generation digital and analytics solutions.

What we do

Design shared-services and sourcing strategies

Create an organization’s shared-services- and sourcing-strategy blueprints, including defining key design options and their trade-offs to provide clear parameters for decision making

Implement shared-services and sourcing strategies

Implement shared-services and sourcing strategies, including setting up shared-services centers, providing overall project management, and introducing and integrating the shared-services offering to the wider organization

Transform shared-services operations

Transform shared-services operations by leveraging next-generation levers, including implementing automation, digital, and advanced analytics, and by guiding operating-practice improvement to sustain the shared-services impact

Build capabilities

Develop an organization’s capabilities to ensure sustainable and long-lasting impact, enabling transformations to achieve their full potential and delivering education and training through customized programs to achieve organization-specific objectives

30–70%

productivity increase

>20%

increase in stakeholder satisfaction

>100

shared-services and functional experts

Examples of our work

Restructuring a Middle Eastern shared-services entity

We launched targeted initiatives to design an entity that could support the sustained growth the provider sought over the midterm. Initiatives included sourcing at-scale capabilities at an 85 percent lower cost, institutionalizing practices (such as career-path mapping, lean process design, and capacity planning), and revamping board governance.

Implementing global business services at scale for an industrial-engineering global leader

We implemented global business services at scale for an industrial-engineering global leader, delivering $80 million to $90 million in savings and affecting more than 4,000 full-time equivalents. Execution of the implementation program occurred over approximately 24 months, including more than 12 months of support by McKinsey and a third-party implementation partner in a build-operate-transfer model.

Scaling up, merging, and spinning off a global shared-services network

We helped a global materials-and-agricultural company set and achieve bold aspirations for integrating more than ten centers and splitting into two independent organizations. We undertook this process while significantly scaling up the company’s operations and enabling efficiency improvements of 20 percent to support significant synergy creation.

Featured capabilities

Global business services academy: Our program offers capability building and training for shared-services leaders and their top talent-team members.

Global business services playbook: Our comprehensive guide helps organizations set up, scale, and transform shared services. It has more than 30 modules and guides a structured, step-by-step journey.

Global Business Services 360: Our complete diagnostic-to-implementation tool drives world-class service operations. It assesses performance and compares it with internal and external benchmarks to diagnose performance gaps. It uses industry best practices and experts to design customized solutions and to capture value in pilots and subsequent waves.

Locations-360: Our framework evaluates readiness of a country or city of interest for global sourcing by pinpointing gaps to help define entry strategies (for companies) and policy interventions (for governments).

Digital back office: Our comprehensive framework accelerates value in shared-services and service-operations environments. The approach focuses on three dimensions of value: automation to eliminate manual work and release capacity, analytics to leverage the power of data through applicable use cases, and innovation to build new service lines and capabilities.

Featured insights

Blog Post

The value of innovation in global business services
Global business services organizations need to move beyond the status quo. Here’s how.
Blog Post

What global business services need in 2023
Four actions can help GBS teams deliver new value in a volatile environment.
Article

Preparing global business services for the next normal
– Shared-services and GBS organizations face twin needs: to accelerate digital capabilities and learn to work within a constantly evolving environment.
Article

Global capability centers in the next normal
– Companies with large global operations had to respond quickly to COVID-19. Now their short-term fixes are turning out to offer longer-term opportunities.

Featured experts

Jonathan Silver
Partner, Tel Aviv
Helps companies drive performance through transformation of their support functions and global shared services

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