Operational Excellence in GBS

When Good Enough Stops Being Good Enough

Most GBS organisations reach a point where they have achieved the initial efficiency gains they were set up to deliver. Costs are down, processes are running, and the basic SLAs are being met. But the business is not particularly impressed, and leadership is starting to ask harder questions about what GBS is actually contributing beyond keeping the lights on.

A significant proportion of the GBS leaders who come to Inixia arrive at exactly this point. The operation is performing. The basics are working. But there is a disconnect with the business, which does not fully recognise the value GBS is generating. As Tony Saldanha, Co-Founder of Inixia, puts it:

“The biggest challenge for GBS leaders boils down to a few things. One is: what do I want to be when I grow up? The second is: how do I convince and communicate to the company that I can be more than an efficiency engine inside the company, that I can be a transformation engine?”

Getting from efficient to indispensable is the hardest distance to close in GBS, and it almost always requires changing what the function measures before it can change how it is perceived.

What Operational Excellence Actually Looks Like

Operational excellence in GBS is not about perfecting individual processes in isolation. It is about building a system where improvement is continuous, performance is visible, and the organisation is consistently delivering value that the business can see and feel.

That requires three things working together: a robust service delivery model that defines how work gets done, a performance measurement framework that tracks the right outcomes, and a culture of business process improvement that is embedded into how teams operate day to day.

Building a Service Delivery Model That Works

A service delivery model is the architecture that sits behind everything the GBS organisation does. When it is well designed, it makes the operation predictable, scalable, and easy to improve. When it is poorly designed, every change becomes a fire-fighting exercise.

The foundations of a strong service delivery model include a clear service catalogue that defines what is provided, to whom, and at what cost. Processes need to be standardised across locations and teams to reduce variability and make training and quality control manageable. A tiered support structure, where straightforward queries are handled through self-service and more complex issues escalate to specialists, keeps the operation efficient without sacrificing quality. And everything should be designed with the end-user in mind, not just the operational team.

Measuring Organisational Performance

The metrics a GBS organisation chooses to track say a lot about how it sees itself. Organisations that only measure cost per transaction are telling the business that efficiency is all they care about. Organisations that measure business impact are telling a very different story. As Tony Saldanha observes:

“The most underrated capability for GBS leaders right now is figuring out your business outcomes and the metrics around the business outcomes. Most GBS leaders tend to think of business outcomes as something that will happen if they do a lot of activities. In reality, you have to start from the outcomes and work backwards.”

Measuring organisational performance effectively means tracking across four categories, not just one.

The shift from the first two categories to the last two is what changes how GBS is perceived by senior leadership.

A useful illustration of this comes from Inixia’s work with a global pharmaceuticals company with revenues above fifty billion dollars. The organisation had a mature GBS operation that was technically efficient and meeting its operational SLAs. The problem was that senior leadership did not see GBS as a strategic partner – it was viewed as a well-run cost centre. Through an engagement focused on redesigning the operating model for innovation, the organisation moved from measuring transactional performance to tracking business outcomes. GBS leaders were equipped to communicate in the language of business impact rather than operational metrics, and governance mechanisms were embedded to ensure that the changes were sustained. The result was that GBS progressed into Stage 4 maturity, functioning as a strategic innovation partner to the enterprise and enabling the rapid adoption of AI-enabled capabilities.

Driving Business Process Improvement

Continuous improvement does not happen by accident. It requires a structured methodology and a team that has been trained to use it. Frameworks like Lean and Six Sigma give organisations the tools to identify root causes rather than just symptoms, and to implement changes that stick.

In practice, this means mapping current-state processes to understand exactly how work flows today, identifying where waste, delays, or errors are introduced, designing a future state that eliminates those issues, and piloting changes in a controlled way before rolling them out broadly. The key word is continuous. This is not a one-off project; it is an operating discipline.

The Path to Continuous Improvement

Building operational excellence in GBS takes time, but the payoff is significant. Organisations that get this right become genuinely indispensable to the business, rather than just a function that runs quietly in the background.

If your GBS organisation is struggling to demonstrate value or consistently meet the expectations of its stakeholders, Inixia’s practitioner-led service management training can help. The course gives GBS leaders and service owners the practical skills to build and sustain operational excellence.

Explore the Service Management Training Course