RvaluE Consulting: The Pioneers and Gurus for Shared Services & Business Process Services

Consultants Review - January 2016: With the first wave of offshoring services by American Express in the mid-1990s to restructure business processes and realize labour arbitrage, India has emerged as the leading global destination for offshoring of IT and Business Process Services. Leveraging this model, in the early 2000, Indian Corporations like Hindustan Unilever initiated the journey of exploring Shared Services and Business Process Management (BPM) as a strategic enabler for business growth and competitive advantage, well demonstrating it’s potential. Despite this, a huge myth prevailed in the minds of Corporate Leaders of Indian corporations that such a BPM strategy would not yield the desired result for their own adoption, since there is no cost arbitrage, little realizing the power and benefits of Shared Services & Business Process Services.

It demanded one niche strategic and operational consulting organization, blending global BPM and India experience, to break this myth and deliver the most trusted consulting solutions to Indian organizations: and, that is RvaluE Consulting! The organization was formed with the unswerving efforts of Ravi Ramakrishnan, Founder & CEO of RvaluE, an industry veteran, instrumental to set up the offshoring operations at American Express and with prior CXO level experience in manufacturing and service companies in India. With the end goal to rise as a ‘global as well as local’ consulting solutions company, RvaluE embarked on its journey in 2005. Born out of his entrepreneurial spirit and vision, Ravi Ramakrishnan says, “RvaluE means ‘realizing business value’ and we have built an accomplished team in the BPM & SS space to bring ‘Best in Class’ to ‘Best in Context’ practices of global offshoring operations and India domestic organizations, together to clients, and create what we passionately call as ‘Global India’!”

Strategy and execution on the one hand, and Knowledge and industry expertise on the other, are two major combinations that work well in favour of a business, if applied well. This was known well to Ravi, who, with a well-motivated and experienced team, progressively orchestrated a ‘three pronged’ consulting focus on Business Process landscape- through sourcing advisory and shared services, leadership and capability development, and Shared Services Forum (SSF), a platform for sharing industry expertise for BPM adoption, execution and recognition. RvaluE clearly stands out as a ‘pioneer’ for creating and sustaining this unbeatable combination of services to and sharing this knowledge with its expanding client base of global, MNCs, and mid to large Indian corporations. And, given many of the first-of-its-kind achievements in the global India context like business case for India SSCs, RFPs for spinning off SSC, multiple operating and structuring models of SSCs, Finance academies for BPOs, assessment, application and evaluation of eSourcing Capability Model developed by Carnegie Mellon University, USA, RvaluE and its senior leaders are today acclaimed as thought leaders of the Business Process and Shared Services space.

Ravi gladly acknowledges that, “the SSF raised the contribution of RvaluE to Industry ever since the forum was launched in 2011, with the forum becoming the reservoir of expertise for India through pioneering conclave events, survey reports and publications in respect of Shared Services & Business Process landscape”. The forum is totally unique having successfully completed 5 Conclave events with more than 500 leaders as delegates, 60+ CXOs/ BPM Practitioners as speakers, 21 organizations recognized, and 4 pioneering leaders felicitated. “All these are brought together, mainly with a view to share knowledge, case studies, best practices and recognitions to innovate on business processes and system enhancements”, adds Ravi.

“We have been partnering with organizations for over a decade now, to carry out over 30+ advisory and transformational assignments and set up over 14 Shared Service Centers (SSC) within India and overseas, demonstrating delivery of 20-25% cost saves,” says Rakesh Sinha, the VP & Business Leader of RvaluE. He adds, “Our expertise extends to multiple functions including Finance &Accounting, Supply Chain, HR, Marketing and IT etc., and hence, this helps to create a holistic ‘organization wide’ strategy for the client organization to bring optimum scale for redesigning business processes, while the execution can be phased”. RvaluE reviews and assesses how to redesign the ‘staff’ functions into a ‘line’ functions i.e. with metrics to determine its performance and contribution and convert the ‘support’ function into a ‘service’ function. Rakesh emphasises that, “Based on our experience in process design and transformation,

RvaluE has several proprietary frameworks and tools that are niche and customized, giving us a unique positioning and edge, enabling our clients to make RvaluE as their preferred collaborative partner for end to end focus, from strategy creation to implementation.”

Detailing the company’s success, Ravi Ramakrishnan says, “We connect with CXOs to make Business Process Management a strategic priority in today’s changing and volatile world. We have tailored operating models (like Captive Operations/ Shared Services, Managed Captive, BOT, etc.,) that ‘best fit’ to suit the business needs of clients and become a platform to focus on and add value to business requirements. Over the last 10 years, we have only demonstrated this more and more.”

RvaluE recognizes ‘business and people are two sides of the same coin’. Rakesh Sinha states that, “the success of SSC or BPM requires not just redesigning of processes but also retooling of skills and capabilities i.e. moving beyond a ‘silo’ function attitude to process, service and customer orientation, driving performance through metrics and constantly leading and driving change and projects”. In order to enable this, Ravi says that, “the team has created workshops and interactions like SSC Orientation, metrics framework, IT Tools for BPM, academies etc., to support professional /people growth and step up the leadership pipeline.”RvaluE has a tie up with Canada as an exclusive provider for offering ‘Leader as A COACH’ global workshops in India.

RvaluE’s focus has consistently been to emerge as a leading consulting firm and the team has rigorous expansion plans for the same. Since its inception, the company has garnered a vast client base across India and overseas. Some of the leading names that the company has catered to are Ranbaxy, Aviva, Volvo Eicher, Future Group, ICICI Bank, Nestle, Luxor, Dr Reddys, and so on. Besides its Indian clientele, the company also serves businesses in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the US. “India has been our primary focus but we now look beyond India and other locations as well. We cut across domains, service functions, size of the company, location footprint and geography etc., Having regional and global footprints has always been a strategic direction for RvaluE.” says Ramakrishnan.

The company’s journey in the consulting space has been nothing less than a success story. The team while delivering its services maintains an edge and the approach to stand out. It offers solutions that no other consulting firm does or can. “Our team becomes an integral part of the client’s team or we see ourselves as an extension of the client team. That’s what we do and what the client receives from us,” states Ravi Ramakrishnan. He adds that, “Our value proposition is something that today no one is offering, which is only one part of the story. We want to continue to be the pioneers and thought leaders and that’s our focus.”

To ensure sustainable growth, the RvaluE team has already put its future plans in place. During the years ahead, the company would be looking forward to strengthen adoption of Shared Services &BPM through leadership round tables, process journals, visits to other global/ India SSCs and networking interactions for companies at various regional locations. Increasingly, besides the strategic execution services in Business Process space, RvaluE is being asked by clients to bring its operational expertise to manage and run their captive operations, as this calls for different mind-set and skill sets. Leadership development in Business Services is a major area that the company will continue to focus in the future. The organization aims to figure out ways to coach and mentor the future leaders to take the initiative of transformation to drive the company to the peak. With vast number of BPOs having stiff competition/ unhealthy price wars, directly impacting their viability and margins, RvaluE is creating ‘Value Exchange’ as a platform for consolidation of BPOs to enhance scale and provide improved services to their clients in India and overseas. . With all these comprehensive offering and multitude of services, strong accomplishments of the past 10 years and concrete future plans, RvaluE is scaling greater heights to become respected more as ‘gurus’ of the Global India BPM space!

Source: Consultants Review