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Professional GBS^® Strategic Costing

How to Position GBS Costs

For full course details, please download our brochure

If you are hearing mixed messages from your senior business partners about the cost and quality of your GBS services, even though your benchmarking shows that your GBS performance is good, then this pillar will be of value.

Pillar Overview

How to best communicate the value and price of services, as well as new business capabilities, so that there is no confusion on cost reduction and
value creation by GBS.
The intent of this pillar is to design the financial framework for how cost elements of GBS services are captured and charged back as needed and, equally importantly, how the story of GBS value creation is communicated to users and senior business clients.
The starting point of this pillar is a GBS service catalog. This helps set up a clear boundary of scope for a GBS service, as well as the overall “architecture,” which can be compared with other benchmarked organizations.
For each watertight GBS service, the next step is to define the financial resource units i.e., the unit costing element such as payroll run per person, or cost of office space per employee, or the cost of paying a supplier invoice. This involves making tradeoffs between the financial data available and what is a logical unit that makes sense to senior business leaders.
For each financial costing unit, we must also identify whether the business has any control over the decisions related to the consumption of this service
(e.g., for the consumption of computers as a service, can they decide which of their own people get highend laptops vs. basic laptops?). This determines
the GBS chargeback strategy of percentage cost allocation vs. direct chargeback for actual consumption of services.
The outcome of this pillar’s workshops will be an overall Service Costing plan and a communication framework on what information is shared with whom.

Download the Professional GBS^® Service Management Brochure

Who Should Attend

This subject is important know-how for GBS senior leaders and GBS Service Managers in any GBS organization. They should include Service
Managers who are accountable for defining the service strategy and financial performance of their respective services. They ought to invite GBS Operational Managers who deliver the day-to-day operational elements, BPO partners who might be delivering some of their services, and people in GBS Finance for the execution.

We recommend that this design work be done ideally at an end-to-end service level and should be chartered appropriately so that workshop attendees are empowered to make decisions on behalf of their companies.

This workshop requires that all attendees have previously gone through the Professional GBS modules of Foundations and Service Management.

Why It Matters

The biggest cause of failure of a GBS model in a company is negative “perceptions.” These include the perception that GBS is too expensive, that it is not delivering the right quality operations for the cost, or that a lower cost of operations has led to a diminished employee experience. Often these perceptions are shaped by big, one-off circumstantial incidents (e.g., a visible email outage). Or, when cost-savings are delivered, there is no reference data on whether the service cost is competitive versus external benchmarks. Other times it may be the perception that the trend is not moving in the right direction.

Such perceptions often ignore the underlying cause that GBS services may be operating against targets that are inherently unviable (e.g., delivering improved service levels at reduced FTEs and with no control over the money or people for continuous improvement). Also, these perceptions may be driven by a lack of visibility or sufficient choices for senior business leaders over the GBS costing model.

Creating an overall “GBS financial model” which includes GBS cost management, transparent chargeback and recovery mechanisms, GBS choices to the business units, and an effective story on how GBS’ financial performance relates to peer benchmarks, is therefore critical.

This pillar delivers a holistic GBS Financial Model, as well as the implementation tools and techniques for implementing it for a given GBS service (like Payroll shared service).

What Sets Us Apart

Inixia offers best-in-class training led by best-in-class instructors. But don’t just take it from us.

We’ve worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies.

The course provided me with valuable theoretical knowledge and practical examples (real cases) that I've already begun applying in my daily work. Particularly impactful were the strategies I learned, such as "Less is more," “conducting 1:1 sessions with stakeholders and sponsors”, “embracing the concept of Love the Problem," and effectively communicating the benefits through "Amplifying the Message" and "What's in it for me?". This holistic approach has already started to positively influence my transformation journey within the company.

Mirela Covolam

“The Professional GBS^® Certification Program is a priceless training program for both seasoned and novice shared services leaders. The program equipped me with the knowledge, network, and practical tactics I needed to create a strategy for my HR Shared Services team and provide value to my clients.”