Business process outsourcing Faster, smarter, better
When Flight Centre CFO Adam Murray needed to transform the company’s finance operations, he developed a BPO project with Cognizant that has delivered deep and lasting change.
F
inance functions across the globe are under incredible amounts of pressure to be more effective, more efficient and to deliver more than simple score keeping. To put it bluntly, they need to do it cheaper, smarter and faster. And so when Adam Murray engaged Cognizant to do an ‘art of the possible’ review, which involved the tech provider undertaking a full review of Flight Centre’s finance function to explore and understand what opportunities existed for greater efficiencies, he was not sure what to expect.
Clear goals
Even so, Murray was certainly clear on what he wanted to achieve. “Cost out was definitely a key part of it and where we were,” he says. “Our transactional finance function at the time – as you see with a lot of those functions in finance – was probably struggling.” Murray points to the fact that many transactional roles had become “repetitive, and not particularly fulfilling”. As a result, staff turnover levels were too high, with the company becoming too reliant on contract staff.
“After a period of that, it feels very much like you’re always trying to hold things together, which is not really a sustainable model,” Murray continues. “So when Cognizant came in and did its review, it was a light bulb moment for me. It was very much looking in that critical mirror, highlighting things I probably already knew, but really seeing it brought face-to-face made the difference.
“Cognizant was actually really brilliant at being prepared to challenge us around that as well and were really quite open about what they found. It was glaring stuff for me, in that we talked about accounting operations being a centre of excellence for processor efficiency, but the reality was we weren’t using any meaningful metrics to measure that.” The other revelation concerned Flight Centre’s processes, which Murray concedes required stiffening into a more robust and resilient shape. As is the case in many other organisations, a lack of planning had led to an over-reliance on individuals making things work by plugging gaps, at times over-reaching to
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
do the right thing. In short, the status quo was unsustainable.
A fork in the road
Following the completion of the review, Murray and his team were presented with three options. One was to fix it themselves through internally- driven improvements. The second option was to partner with Cognizant to improve the current model. “Or, Flight Centre could take a ‘lift and shift’ approach and effectively outsource its finance systems and processes,” Murray says. “And for us, having examined it, the benefit of going with the third option was that it didn’t involve us having to invest up front to realise benefits further down the line. With lift and shift, labour arbitrage was a key thing. And it’s fair to say that there was little appetite from the business to commit a sizable chunk of investment in a function that no-one really sees, if we’re honest, to realise savings down the line.” Crucially, however, the CFO now reflects that a full BPO approach offered a golden opportunity to embed real and lasting change.
Adam Murray, CFO of Flight Centre.
“When Cognizant came in and did its review, it was a light bulb moment for me. It was very much looking in that critical mirror, highlighting things I probably already knew.”
As the project began to take shape, it was clear that reducing cost would be a central theme. Alongside that BPO project, the company was also embedding a sustainable process improvement over time, with digital technology at the heart of the change. “We’ve seen finance functions embraced in this digital journey, and for us it’s become more and more apparent, as our relationship with Cognizant has progressed, that we had to plug into this digital capability, which we didn’t have internally,” Murray explains.
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