A business leader with 20+ years of experience in driving operational excellence
programs. After serving top organisations such as KPMG, Hackett, and AoL, Stephen is currently
the SVP of Estee Lauder’s first-ever GBS organization – One Source.
CEO and Founder of HighRadius, a Fintech enterprise SaaS company that leverages
AI-based Autonomous Systems to help companies automate Accounts Receivable and Treasury. Sashi’s
leadership has secured the trust of 200+ Global 2000 companies.
Podcast Summary: Six Million-Dollar Questions every GBS Leader wants
to Know
Misc:Your midlife crisis story is the most
touching story I’ve heard. So for the other GBS leaders here, who want to find out more about this
ability to recruit onshore, where should they look things up?
Key Points
I created a start-up to prove that you can have an onshore BPO successful in commercial
operation.
We did it with military spouses and veterans- kind of a community that was overlooked by the
commercial community.
I plugged into a government-run agency, which the military spouses are affiliated with it.
Military Spouse Employment Partnership (M.S.E.P.)
There are many big multinational plugins there
It’s an untapped talent pool of really skilled men and women
That’s how Liberty Source was founded with that group of people
Million-Dollar Question #1: You founded Liberty Source as an
alternative to BPOs. So, based on your experience, which model would you recommend, Outsourcing or a
Captive Center?
Key Points
Today, every business model is changing at a record pace.
The decision is all about creating as many levels of opportunities as possible.
The answer is to go for a Hybrid Model, because why wouldn’t you have both the oars in
the
water.
By outsourcing to a BPO will give you the advantage of talent and maybe a
geography
footprint that is different from yours
Through captive centers, you can pivot quickly when needed because it’s all about
staying relevant to the business.
Million-Dollar Question #3:You’ve been keen on transforming GBS
with a mix of automation. What is your view on tools like RPA and maybe a little bit on AI if
you’ve done anything in that space?
Key Points
RPA is becoming the new face of the technology in the GBS space
Take any process, the ERPs are known to have the technical roadmaps and RPA acts as the
sprinklers on top of it.
RPA may conflict with the IT process roadmap.
When the ERP is ready to be deployed, we can just turn off the RPA, so it won’t disrupt the
destination in their roadmap.
RPA always acts as the bridging mechanism.
Never jump into RPA without knowing your end processes because it will contaminate the
process further.
Million Dollar Question #4: How do you transform GBS from a
cost-cutting function to a revenue driver function- potentially a strategic partner with your
business stakeholders?
Key Points
It’s very similar to playing baseball, you can’t skip first base, which is the
cost-cutting
strategy.
Once you are clear with the first base, you can move towards the second base, which is the
value-add strategy.
OneSource – Estee Global Business Strategy
Started by clearing the first base of cost-cutting for 3-4 years
Any process that came to One Source was at least 1/3rd cheaper through
a mix of BPO,
RPA, and
Process Reengineering
Then started thinking about value-add since it’s about getting the right product to
the right
consumer at the right time.
Today we find people coming to One Source, seeking help for streamlining their
processes.
And then we fix the process because it’s not just about saving that 1/3rd
dollar.
We dig the process to figure out what is holding up the collateral from getting to
the counter-front.
Select your key customers who really value you to tell the story of how you leverage
internal GBS for something more than just saving cost
Million Dollar Question #5: What’s your view on the trade-off
between ERP solutions like SAP or Oracle and software platforms like HighRadius, Coupa,
BlackLine, and others.
Key Points
ERPs were a bit oversold in the past years with a mindset that it could do everything-
proved wrong over the years.
ERPs are definitely adaptive, agile, and responsive to the ever evolving requirements from
the end-users.
But this was years and years ago, and today we have much better software offering a better
experience for the end-users than the ERPs.
ERPs are still standing in the marketplace, but when you have broad end-user exposure,
those are total SaaS zones.
