Essel group, an Indian multinational, is a conglomerate with diversified interests in Media, Entertainment, Infrastructure, Education, Mining, Finance, packaging and technology.

Having accredited with many “first mover” titles, this conglomerate had already set high benchmarks in the Indian market. Be it the private TV channel (ZEE), or the DTH (Dishtv), or amusement theme park (Essel World) – there are many firsts which Essel Group has pioneered. Similarly, Essel Business Excellence (EBEX), was the first shared service center in the Media and Entertainment segment in India.

The vastly broadened portfolio of business brings with it a highly challenging organizational need of being process oriented, at the same time being agile and compliant.

It was imperative to avoid any business disruption, at the same
time take all the stakeholders along in the journey.
This required an effective Change Management Strategy.

The solution – A highly diligent, consolidated process oriented governance model with standardization, measurable metrics and global benchmarks with the ability to let business RUN, GROW and TRANSFORM.

Flashback: EBEX V1.0: The journey So far – RUN

2015 –The marathon begins. EBEX, the shared services arm of Essel group is born with an endeavour to provide the state-of-art services to its varied internal customers.

The objective at this stage was to achieve service excellence and cost-efficiencies by leveraging economies of scale. From a wide scale of business portfolio, HR and F&A functions were selected to be the forerunners. The transition of these two processes from an operating to a delivery model resulted in benefits and improvement in multiple areas:

2016 - The learnings from the journey so far has provided EBEX a mature outlook in terms of an evolved roadmap for the practices resulting in greater value for the business.

There were a few fronts which we were fighting simultaneously at – timelines, budgets, uncertainty and resistance (internal as well as external). And with my experience, I was clear, that sequential moves would only help in such a scenario.

It was imperative to avoid any business disruption, at the same time take all the stakeholders along in the journey. This required an effective Change Management Strategy.

A few critical learnings during RUN:

• Create an evolution roadmap considering various attributes like organization environment, existing processes and baselined metrics, proposed benefits, business values, service levels.

• Share the evolution roadmap and develop the relationships and collaboration required

• Building consensus and sign off on transition state metrics

• Initiate and handhold the change management process with benchmarked service levels

• Measure and report the new KPI’s

• Allow flexibility in adoption strategy accounting for the business dynamics.

The learning from V1.0 has created readiness and maturity to move towards the next leap. So while the modules HR and F&A now move onto phase 2 into a state of GROW, they have laid a foundation of a robust and scalable shared service which can expand its wings in functions like IT, Procurement , R2R (Record to Report), Collection and Legal.

Managing is thing of the past, next was - GROW - EBEX V2.0

EBEX had started changing the perception by now – it was no longer merely a transaction processing arm. It had started delivering value, stakeholders and customers had started expecting more. In V2.0 the goal set was to deliver "grow the business" value to the organization.

This matured lap envisioned to move further to achieve newer objectives –

With periodic MIS reports, Audit Assistance, Book closure activities, the R2R (record to report ) function has not only shifted the ownership of the entity level balance sheets to EBEX, but also has given a lot of progressive insights for the future road map.

Defined input – predictable output – reduces anxiety,
builds acceptance.

The mantra to a long term sustainable success lies in the multi-facet strategy focusing on the 3 pillars of organization:

1. PEOPLE – STAKEHOLDER OWNERSHIP

   "What services do the clients need? Can we provide efficiently with high levels of accuracy at attractive prices?" This requires a permanent and very close relationship with clients. Clients should be equally engaged and committed in shaping the services they will buy from the shared service centre. Doing this lowers the risk and cost of implementing the business-balanced scorecard by putting in place the required operational controls.

2. PROCESS – AUTOMATION, TURNAROUND TIME, CONSOLIDATION

   Business Activity Monitoring - Monitoring critical business processes for exceptional performance is an emerging response to the need for more agile, cost-effective enterprises.

   By putting a thoroughly evaluated process across different industry verticals within the Essel group, we:

   • Could save 80+ FTE’s in first 2 years of operations
   • Brought down the wage bill by more than INR 50 Mn.
   • Improved efficiencies by up to 30% by re- engineering and automated processes
   • Reduced TAT for the AP process from 15 days to 2 days, digitization of the invoices is an add-on to it.
   • Reduced quarterly book closure window from 23-25 days to 7 days.
   • Unified the helpdesk – Single window to attend issues related to all process as well as vendor / Employee queries.
   • Created a standard template. On boarding a new entity takes us less than a week’s time now.
   • Directly saved more than INR 1000 Mn. through consolidation of requirements and centralized procurement.
   • Exploited the available resources within the group, which were otherwise lying idle –resulting in further savings of INR 50 Mn.
3. TECHNOLOGY – BOLT-ON TOOLS AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

   There are several examples of institutions which were once considered invincible but are now almost extinct –largely due to failure in keeping pace with the ever changing technologies.

   Gone are those days when implementation of some technology was considered to be an expense - it is now an investment. An investment which differentiates you from the traditional masses, gives you an edge over your competitors, helps you in being future-ready.

   Businesses are demanding, compliances and governance are getting tighter, transparency is at its peak with the social media platforms in abundance, requirements from the different stake holders are dynamic – to be able to even meet the business expectations, one needs to be abreast of the environment all the time.

   We implemented several bolt-on tools which interfaced with our existing ERP platforms, such as workflow tools, travel portal, helpdesk master data tool, intranet – which became the foundation for digital transformation.

   This sets the prologue for our next lap V3.0

The winning Strategy - TRANSFORM - EBEX V3.0

We now see the emergence of EBEX V3.0, which aims even higher — helping the organization transforms its business. Instead of looking at improving the existing services, we now look at the business roadmap to identify areas where we can fit in to accelerate the pace. We try to envisage what will be needed in future to support the business and move to make them available when they are needed.

Clients will not need to look out for different vendors for their different requirements. We have to be, and we are available, anytime, anywhere – for anything, and everything. And we are aligned to the business outcome:

• Working capital efficiency brought in by EBEX, and
• Savings brought in by the Shared Service Centre

Having harmonized processes and created a consistent delivery model in V2.0, the need now is to create an innovative streak that raises the already set high benchmarks. At each step, EBEX adds more processes and more sophisticated services to its portfolio. In doing so, it offers additional classes of benefits, moving from the operational, to the tactical, to the strategic.

This is the stage when the value, relevance and efficacy of Shared Services have to be maximized. To do so we follow the approach of evaluating Readiness, Risk and Benefits.

For the interest of the readers, I would like to bust a myth:

While the former may construe a paperless office scenario, or making a document available in soft copy, the latter is a much bigger concept. SMAC, Bots, Mobility, Integrated Automated processes, Defined workflows – these are few enablers which can be playing a disruptive role in mending the rules of the game for future.

Let me now share the approach for transformation where digitization is one of the pivots of shared services. At Essel group, our customers can approach us through multiple channels.

Irrespective of the channel, we should be able to provide similar experience to the user and take feedback which includes responsiveness, business understanding and business resolution. To make this happen, it was imperative to create a self-service interactive portal where the standard queries & FAQ’s are present.

The Approach

1. Integrate the Stakeholder:

   1. ) We launched a web based feedback channel by leveraging the ESSEL Connect intranet portal. The portal provides real time feedback and C-Sat of stakeholders with respect to the services provided/ consumed.

   2. ) Essel Connect intranet portal was also leveraged to provide updates on:

      1. New process changes
      2. Significant operational highlights
      3. Update of major government policy changes impacting operations (e- Invoicing, GST, law amendments etc.)

   3. ) One of the key areas of focus at EBEX is to align its service delivery to measurable business outcomes. Further it is also required that a common and consistent view of the process is defined and understood both within EBEX as well as other entities. For this, process design workshops involving business stakeholders and EBEX team was conducted. Through the above workshops an integrated performance dashboard linking the business outcomes to the operational measures was developed

   4. ) To service our employees and stakeholders better - Case Management System developed within the Intranet system where employees/ stakeholders raise queries and EBEX resolves in time bound manner. The service feedback is captured at the point of closure giving an additional measure of service satisfaction.

2. Create capability and to be a Centre of Excellence:

   A set of actions and initiatives to develop Process competency were under taken:

   1. ) Process SOP repository on Intranet. This provided a single source of process view to all stakeholders - internal as well as external. There should be only one version of the process and if any changes are required, it has to pass through a stringent jury of Change Control Board.

   2. ) Trained the EBEX team on lean six sigma tools to drive continuous improvement paradigm

   3. ) An EBEX wide Digital quotient appreciation and training program was rolled out where employees were exposed to digital and social media platforms and were able to understand and appreciate the impact of such tools on organization transformation

   One thing I’ve come to learn about myself is that I have to keep
   going. – Andrew Mason

3. Performance, Analytics and Insights:

   Leveraging the investments in SAP HANA, EBEX started providing HR, F&A and Procurement analytics & insights to the CXO’s. To ensure that analytics output is consumed and internalized by senior business stakeholders, industry standard data visualization tool like Tableau was implemented. Ebex raised the capability of analytics which is more visual and stakeholders do not need to open an excel file and see what is mentioned at the bottom of each line and then interpret the reports.

4. Digital Transformation:

   1. ) Leverage Robotic Process Automation to eliminate manual data validation and entry for bank, vendor, inter co. reconciliation and PR_PO conversion. We have partnered with vendors to create above capabilities

   2. ) E-Payment modules were rolled out. This ensured that the entire Hire-to-Retire and Procure-to-Pay value chain was digitally transformed

   3. ) As our customers are sitting across the globe, training them is not only expensive but time consuming. We have setup a simulation lab where users/ employees/ stakeholders can are trained to make process adoption, adherence and compliance more effective

And the results are:

Looking back, it gives us immense pride to see where EBEX has reached today. At the same time, looking forward gives a lot of confidence and relentless faith of becoming a trendsetter.

We are Essel group.
We are young @ 90!

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