explains that the transformation supports our Finance Brilliant Basics: a foundational approach to making sure that transactional processing was outsourced to experts.
Developing a best in class BPO approach is aimed at enabling the business to develop greater agility in what is a volatile world, and it should also help us integrate acquisitions more smoothly in the future. “GBS was a really key strategic move for Inchcape, so it was vital we got it right.”
First things first
The task of executing the plan was entrusted to Madi Pistola. Having joined Inchcape in 2020, she set about understanding the business’s processes and infrastructure. In doing so, she worked with Cognizant to assess the business’s needs, design a solution, and implement one of the most ambitious transformation solutions around.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Madi says. “This is my eighth transition, and although some have been larger than Inchcape, it’s certainly been the most complex from the systems, processes and scale of change perspective.” For the group transformation director, no project can hope to succeed without first asking a fundamental question: why are we doing it? Inchcape’s previous consultations on updating its financial systems and processes had recommended a captive approach to digitisation of the finance function, partly as a response to the complexity of the group’s structure. Yet Madi explains that it soon became apparent that, while from a financial perspective a captive approach would represent the lowest cost option, “it would mean a huge investment anyway, because the business had no standard processes”. And that is something of an understatement: Inchcape operates in 39 markets but had managed to accumulate 36 ERPs – with only 12 of them including SAP – with some of the remainder offering a nostalgic reminder back to the 1980s. The result, Madi recalls, was that an initial run-through found 1,200 processes globally.
The confusion was reflected and reinforced by the initial feedback from the company’s employment surveys, which revealed some significant challenges: staff were working long hours with little return within what she calls a ‘hero culture’, where the completion of certain tasks depended entirely on certain individuals’ presence.
“So, when you added that to the usual reasons for wanting to simplify and standardise processes, and put in place better controls on systems, it was a compelling case,” she says. “It was also important to give an opportunity to the finance teams to become
Finance Director Europe /
www.ns-businesshub.com
Madi Pistola, finance transformation director at Inchcape.
more focused on business partnering through having more of an end-to-end business role – rather than just closing the books and paying invoices effectively.”
Drawing a roadmap
Having convinced the senior leadership team of the importance of a large-scale BPO project, it was then vital to explain how Madi saw Inchcape making the journey and to harness the company’s finance talent to help deliver it.
In practice, that meant finding a way of scaling the company’s existing ERPs and then efficiently integrating acquisitions onto the new standard model. And so, after a full evaluation of Inchcape’s needs, it was decided to take a ‘lift and shift’ approach that would cut the number of processes down to just 80. Cognizant devised a transition process that involved spending a month designing a detailed strategy, followed by six weeks of knowledge acquisition. Once that was completed, two months of end-of-service readiness testing was scheduled. In the end, the model that Inchcape settled on involved a main hub in India with three spokes: one in Malaysia, one in Poland and one in Mexico.
A bigger bang?
Madi then had to decide whether the business – and its chosen BPO partner – was able to deliver on a rapid global rollout and in so doing avoid a long, drawn-out transformation process. “There were two options as we saw it. We could do a two-year transition market-by-market slowly, or go for a bigger bang approach and deliver several markets simultaneously.” Having decided on the latter, the transition was done in two phases, with the first three regions transitioned by early November 2020. With a December year end, the board had to be satisfied that go-live was realistic. “I was confident with the amount of month-ends we’d done that we had the right team,” she says. “Obviously
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