Shared Services and Transformation Roadmap Helps Global Specialty Minerals Producer Achieve Successful Post-merger Integration

The Opportunity

The company, a leading specialty minerals producer, after acquiring another company of equal size and scale, wanted to seamlessly integrate and consolidate backoffice operations in Supply Chain Management (SCM — purchase and logistics) and Finance and Accounting.

There were some inherent challenges in executing the transition:

• The acquired entity followed a location-specific operating model, while the parent company had established a function-specific Global Business Services (GBS) model

• The acquired entity was spread across 15 countries, and had disparate IT systems and no documentation

• The absence of a performance management framework in the acquired entity had led to an increase in supervision costs and efficiency losses

• There was no visibility and control over the operational data of the acquired entity

The WNS Solution

The solution required a thorough understanding of how the current operations were organized and executed to comprehend the intrinsic interdependencies. This would enable a phase-wise integration and transformation roadmap to be designed.

WNS adopted a consultative approach to map the current operating models and identify the operations that could be consolidated into GBS. The operations that could be retained within the location-specific model and those that could be outsourced to an offshore unit were also identified.

The WNS framework was driven by a three-stage LeAD methodology:

• Learn: Define the scope, baseline the SCM models across multiple global business units and engage with the identified teams. The WNS team interacted with more than 150 employees across 15 countries in less than six weeks to understand the operations of the acquired entity and further identify risks and issues

• Analyze: Conduct a gap assessment vis-à-vis existing GBS operations and create process maps after detailed discussions across geographies

• Define: Develop a complete plan for communication, identification of resources, technology implementation, and training and governance along with a detailed process transformation roadmap

Based on the insights from the gap analysis, the WNS team built a robust transition roadmap to integrate and unify the operations by leveraging a shared services model. The roadmap defined the future state of operations and the target operating model (shared services) to result in:

• Implementation of a collaborative platform to deliver seamlessly across disparate systems

• Design of a robust resource model through detailed talent mapping and gap analysis of operations across locations

• Effective approach to change management at scale

• Opportunities to implement technology tools, automation and analytics to drive process standardization and rationalization

The Outcome

The comprehensive, consultativeled engagement resulted in seamless integration and increased efficiencies due to consolidation and centralization. It led to a 30 percent reduction in headcount in SCM operations. The company also benefited from:

• A well-defined target operating model that encompassed all aspects of people, process and technology to achieve operational synergies between both companies

• Design of a robust resource model through detailed talent mapping and gap analysis of operations across locations

• A robust implementation plan that enabled seamless transition

• Centers of Excellence that helped implement best practices and standardize the operations between both companies

Besides the above benefits, the company was also able to build an active pipeline of projects for transformation in related areas covering reporting, analytics, strategic sourcing and more.