This white paper provides you with five key steps to help you plan your digital transformation journey and future-proof your A/R shared services.

1. Set Up For Scalability

A good shared services organization department helps the business run efficiently. A great shared services organization supports the business to remain agile and launch in new markets.
In the globalization paradigm shift, SSCs must expand the geographical coverage and/or increase the functional scope to more services to offer a more complete and scalable service portfolio.
An important principle of this paradigm shift is that by increasing the scale of services offered (both geographically and functionally), an SSC can create fewer dependencies on external service providers and more effectively consolidate technology, processes,
and analytics. In addition to cost savings, doing so can deliver added value through, for example, agility and a more uniform way of interacting with users.

Leveraging Technology as Globalization Accelerator
1. One platform acts as a single source of truth for an SSC and thus provides an integrated order to cash system
2. Provides higher operational efficiency and improved communication for internal team
3. Analytics improves visibility and transparency with KPI tracking

2. Benchmarking and Assessment

Benchmarking is an important part of a continuous learning cycle for organizations to determine the areas of the biggest gap and prioritize those for process improvement. It is necessary to evaluate- How are you doing today against your industry peers? Is there a scope for improvement?
Most immediately, the A/R shared-services organizations can work with IT and the business to designate specific areas in which to incorporate automation and point robotics into their existing manual workflows.

1. A typical starting point would be to perform a detailed assessment of the current order to cash processes to identify maturity gaps. Track the key metrics such as hit rate, DSO, past-due invoices, etc.
2. Next, the SSC organizations must decide which processes should be automated (either fully or partially) and define the TO-BE state while involving all key stakeholders.
   • The answer to the following questions would help you in identifying these processes
     Is it a transactional/rule-driven process?
     Is there a high volume of action items?
     Is it a labor heavy process?
     How are other companies in the market going about it?
     Is there a likelihood of a system change shortly?
3. Furthermore, the A/R leader must get down to the process level to define what exact numbers and metrics should change and by how much
4. A collaborative approach to get approval from the executives involved across the globe through continuous feedback
5. The future change should be planned in accordance with the benchmarked results

3. Evaluating the Options and Leveraging Technology

While leveraging technology to digitally transform may sound obvious, what’s not obvious is how to integrate advanced technologies into your shared services organization.
With more and more information at shared services’ fingertips, the real value lies in transforming it into actionable intelligence. Delivering value-adding data can be the differentiating factor that takes shared services from ‘cost killers ’ to ‘value drivers’.
Choosing the Right Vendor
Before you move ahead with the automation, it is necessary that the A/R shared services leaders assess their vendors and understand if they are able to understand your requirements or not.
The answer to the following questions would help you in creating a perfect checklist for your vendor

• What value would they add to your current operations?
• What is the pricing model?
• How do they rank in terms of customer service?
• What is the adaptability of the solution with new technology: Is it system agnostic?
• Would the vendor help us with our future business requirements?

Create Value With Technology

1. Value:What would be the value-addition? Is the ROI justifiable?
2. Scope: Which part of the process should be automated to derive maximum benefits?
3. Feasibility: Can you automate right now, with your data, resources, and timeline constraints?

4. The Execution Phase

Key To Stakeholder Alignment
The timelines for delivering this level of change can be long, which all adds up to a significant investment in time and money. To add to the complexity, shared services organizations span over multiple business stakeholders.
Now given this amount of effort and inevitable risk, how do you go about getting buy-in from business stakeholders to approve the digital transformation, and the budget needed to achieve it?

1. Productivity Improvement: Reallocation of resources to more strategic job roles is better
2. Cost-Savings: Perform a payback analysis while considering total costs vs. expected benefits
3. End-Goal Alignment: How would this project directly improve the metrics that impact your desired TO-BE state

Pilot Deployment Strategy

1. Determine the order of implementation across different business units: from beginning till the end
2. Keep an eye for anything that could go wrong and have a backup plan in place to address it
3. Decide whether you want to implement across multiple geographies at once, or one at a time

5. The End-Phase Of Your Transformation Journey

Change Management
Under a digital model, the shared-services group will need to establish domains of expertise for specific processes, and, within each domain, task small teams of technology and user-experience experts to work together.
Some shared-services groups may need to hire, train, and retain employees differently under this model.

1. Rollout the plan across all BUs with provided timelines
2. Conduct internal training sessions and identify the change champions to support the execution

Implementation and Tracking
Once you are all set with what your system to go-live, what next? What should be the next steps once you are live? What should be the future expectations?

1. Check program readiness, system readiness, workforce readiness, and operational readiness and develop a contingency plan
2. During go-live, to capture end-user feedback
3. Tracking the overall performance and the partnership with the vendor
4. How would you like to improve your process further?