Business process outsourcing
“Being able to plug into that world-class functionality I think has really helped us with that, which we would not have done ourselves,” he adds. “So when you talk about things like robotics and process re-engineering and so on, it’s simply not cost-effective for relatively small finance functions to do that to scale. Being able to plug into that capability has just been fantastic for us.”
team approach robustness of process. “Back in the old sticky tape days it would be that a business asks for someone, and we’d say: ‘oh yes, we can do this’ or ‘we’ll try and do this.’ We’d always set ourselves up to fail – whereas now it’s very much a matter of ‘OK. You’ve got this thing you want to do. Well, these will be the consequences downstream and this is what we need to change and equally, this is what you need to try to change.’
“Back in the old sticky tape days it would be that a business asks for someone, and we’d say: ‘Oh yes, we can do this’ or ‘we’ll try and do this’.”
As the project began to take shape, Murray made it very clear that the desired model must combine clear and fundamental outsourcing of process – and that outsourcing accountability and responsibility for processes and balance sheets was not on the table. “That was really important, so we needed a retained team here to do that, partly to hold Cognizant accountable, but equally to work with Cognizant as partners.”
Having a mix of skills in- house has benefited Flight Centre's finance team.
That collaboration has now taken shape, albeit with a smaller in-house team at Flight Centre. That has led to a different skills mix, something Murray believes can offer much richer roles to finance staff, giving them the chance to shape the company’s direction, managing teams remotely through daily interaction with Cognizant.
In addition, partnering with a BPO provider has driven a paradigm shift in the way Murray and his
A lasting impact
Murray says that even though Flight Centre customers do not have direct dealings with Cognizant, the front end improvements delivered by shaking up the back office have been profound. “It’s easy to underestimate the customer touch points, whether it’s invoicing, statements, and so on,” he says. “For them to be delivered in an accurate, robust, timely manner, customers can see that and there has been a real step change in the quality of that output, which is key. “And it’s not just customers: the impact on operational staff has also been significant. “They are the ones who are interacting with the customers much more than we are – they’re able to meet their deadlines,” he says. “They’ve got the confidence that this stuff is right and it’s working and it’s on time. So I think that has had a genuine impact on our customers and on us being able to do that on scale as well.”
And, three years on, Murray believes that working with Cognizant experts has massively increased the level and scale of insights into Flight Centre’s end- to-end processes, and the ability to build metrics around that.
“So, a simple example would be something like turnaround times of invoicing. In the past, we’d simply have to tell the business there was a backlog – and that would hit our reputation with the rest of the business.” Now, though, the analytics that Cognizant provide as a standard part of the BPO model help the CFO isolate and understand where the issues lie. “We can demonstrate that in fact it’s not a finance issue, but the bottleneck is upstream,” Murray explains. “It’s the fact that you don’t actually get your supplier invoices in the format required on a timely basis that’s causing the problem – they arrive two weeks late so you’re already behind.”
The ability to analytically solve specific problems, rather than it landing at finance’s door as a generic problem, has been a game changer for this CFO. “It’s hugely helpful to provide insights into the detail of our processes,” says Murray. “And it helps us understand where the processes are weak because they have to be robust; you can’t rely on an individual
14 Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
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