Digital transformation is the buzzword today and every organization is looking for innovative strategies to beat competition and stay ahead in the game. Furthermore, business leaders, investors and regulators are calling for greater value, business support and insights into business performance. There is an urgent need for newer business models that can meet these demands.
One of the key ways a business can fast-track its growth journey across geographies is by enhancing its operational efficiency. The rapid proliferation of Global Capability Centers (GCCs) is a result of this growing business need. These centers are gaining significance because of their potential to reshape how multinational corporations manage their global operations.
Before we dig in deeper, let’s take a minute to understand GCC. These are usually offshore entities that provide organizations a vast repertoire of specialized services, including IT, R&D and back-office functions, among others. By enabling access to a diverse talent pool, GCCs are helping businesses drive innovation and become more cost-efficient while significantly improving their performance.
GCCs Are Changing the Way Businesses Operate
The concept of GCCs is not new. What has changed is its evolution from a cost-saving initiative to a strategic must-have for many organizations. Today, GCCs offer greater control over operations and work closely with corporate objectives.
According to an Accenture research, there is significant expected growth in GCC usage in the coming years. The numbers are staggering, with marketing showing a 113% increase, supply chain and logistics 88%, and transformation capabilities showing a 64% increase in GCC adoption. It isn’t really surprising though, since these sectors are the ones to benefit the most from real-time insights and faster innovation.
This paradigm shift in business operations is giving businesses an opportunity to tap into a global pool of top-tier talent trained on the latest technology platforms, giving them the impetus to stay ahead of industry trends, while continuously innovating and maintaining growth.
Some of the benefits of employing the GCC model include:
- Faster Time-to-Market
- Enhanced Scalability and Flexibility
- Improved Access to Best Practices
- Greater Returns on Investment
What Are the Industry Challenges Faced by GCCs?
The thought behind establishing GCCs is to speed up processes so businesses can improve their performance and productivity. However, managing large teams and individuals comes with its fair share of obstacles. Here are a few challenges that GCCs have to overcome when synchronizing operations across multiple geographical regions.
Automating Entire Workflows
Keeping track of each task manually isn’t efficient. It can lead to delays and the process is prone to human error. In addition, task change requests are time-consuming and expensive. Lastly, manual data entry increases the likelihood of mistakes, leading to further loss of time and revenue.
Meeting Service Level Agreements
At any given time, the GCC is managing multiple teams and tasks. The challenge is to efficiently prioritize and allocate tasks to the available resources. This helps prevent Service Level Agreement breaches and also ensures optimal usage across teams.
However, the lack of workflow automation for GCCs creates issues in streamlining the work process. Furthermore, the inability to keep track of tasks can lead to a gap in expected vs actual AHT. Limited visibility on tasks and resources could mean a mismatch between volume and capacity.
Monitoring Distributed Team Performance in Real-Time
The biggest challenge that managers and leaders face with distributed teams is the lack of real-time visibility on jobs and tasks being performed. This can have a direct impact on task scheduling and lower overall productivity. Also, manual consolidation of work from agents can mean incorrect hours and billing. With a hybrid workforce, it is challenging to manage employee well-being, which can affect productivity.
Inefficient Task Management
Inefficient task management can be detrimental to a business, its employees and clients. Businesses will notice lower performance levels, which can decrease morale, lower profits and lead to client dissatisfaction. Inefficiencies in task management also means fewer opportunities to innovate and make changes in the workplace.
Poor Communication and Collaboration
Outdated systems or communication processes can make it challenging to have successful interactions with colleagues and clients. This could lead to messages being missed, responding late to emails or misunderstanding conversations. Regular miscommunication at the office between teams definitely indicates a deeper issue with company systems and processes.
Lack of Transparency and Visibility
For a modern business to be successful, information management, documentation and data distribution is critical. If people need to scramble to get access to information to complete their work, it can slow down projects and impact productivity. This is even more important when different departments need to access the same data but find that each team has a different system for storing information, creating information silos.
Inconsistent Processes
When an organization doesn’t have standardized, efficient processes, it is common to see employees try and find easier solutions, even if management doesn’t endorse that method as a company policy. Some people might follow the official but inefficient methods while others might stick to their unofficial strategies. This can result in vastly inconsistent output, leading to dissatisfied clients. By following one method, and understanding how it works, it is possible to use the data generated to make changes and improve.
Difficulty in Measuring Performance
Consistent, real-time feedback is an important method to identify employee accomplishments. However, in the absence of a system with transparent task allocation, it can be challenging for a manager to measure and recognize performance. Moreover, task allocation should be based upon skills, availability, and existing workload to effectively meet company targets.
Increased Operational Costs
When market demands increase or a business needs to scale suddenly, its operational costs are likely to go up as well. This is because the production process if most likely less efficient. To reduce these administrative and labor costs, it’s important to shift strategy and come up with creative solutions that can better manage the growing workload. Brainstorming to compare and identify where you’re spending more money can save the budget.
Overcoming GCC Challenges with Workflow Automation
Workflow automation for GCCs is the key to unlock the opportunities and manage the challenges that the new business world brings. GCCs that have adopted workflow automation are seeing increased collaboration between teams, improved customer experiences, and are benefiting from data-driven decision-making.
Increased Efficiency
Workflow automation takes over manual, repetitive tasks, leaving employees free to focus on more strategic tasks which leads to faster completion of processes.
Improved Productivity
With efficient task disbursal and allocation, businesses would over time see an increase in productivity.
Greater Transparency and Accountability
Tracking features in the workflow provide complete visibility into the status of ongoing tasks and processes.
Higher Revenue
Streamlining processes and reducing time and resources on tasks can lead to significant cost savings. Additionally, finishing tasks efficiently opens up the possibilities of pulling in additional work.
Better Quality Control
A standardized workflow ensures all tasks are completed to the same quality and compliance levels, thus reducing errors and outcome variability.
Informed Data-Driven Decision Making
Data collected from workflow tools can be analyzed to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement.
Enhanced Flexibility and Adaptability
Workflow processes can be changed as per changes in the business environment or regulatory landscape, enabling organizations to quickly adapt.
Workflow Automation is Reinventing GCCs
Workflow automation has the power to bridge gaps between all the departments and regions of a GCC. By streamlining processes, reducing the time and effort, and minimizing redundancy, workflow automation can lead to faster completion of tasks.
The ProHance workflow management module has been designed to adapt to different operational structures and industries. This comprehensive task management system utilizes innovative algorithms to streamline your team task management, ensures efficient job prioritization and allocation, and facilitates seamless workflow management. Further, advanced analytics from ProHance can be leveraged to constantly refine workflows and offer you a versatile job flow management solution.
Reach out to us for a demo to fully understand the potential of workflow automation in your GCC organization and our role as your partners in this transformation.
