The shared services organisation for BP and Castrol is embarking on a major transformation with Australia and New Zealand to lead in “shaping” the program for global deployment.
The organisation, which is known as Global Business Services (GBS), handles a range of shared services including IT&S, finance, customer service, logistics scheduling, sales and HR. The finance functions are further outsourced to Accenture.
GBS is the result of BP wanting to move from a “geographic, business-led operation to a
process-driven model in order to improve standardisation and efficiencies.”
Back in 2011, the energy giant’s geographic businesses had been outsourcing functions, but there were concerns that “over 85 percent” of processes were being run out of a single location - Bangalore.
It used Project Mariner to rationalise outsourced providers, create global end-to-end processes and standards, and to establish GBS in 2012.
GBS now runs out of shared service centres in Melbourne (A/NZ region), as well as Chicago (US), Hungary (Europe), Cape Town (Africa) and Malaysia (Asia).
However, it has now disclosed a major transformation and change project for which the A/NZ operations are set to take the lead.
“GBS is embarking on a global programme to modernise and transform,” it said at the end of last month.
“As part of this, GBS A/NZ will be leading in shaping the programme that we will then roll out to the other GBS centres globally.
“It will be a fundamental shift in thinking and ways of working within GBS and our downstream businesses.”
The timeline indicated that GBS expects to have delivered “end-to-end process transformation programme initiatives and ... key strategic projects for Australia and New Zealand” by December 2019.
That would mean the global deployment is likely to stretch into at least 2020.
A BP Australia spokesperson declined to comment.
It appears that GBS A/NZ had already been testing improvement opportunities through a worldwide usage lens since at least the end of last year.
At that time, GBS A/NZ said in a video that, in addition to providing the backoffice support to BP and Castrol and their related businesses, the organisation also acted as “the integrated innovator” on those processes.
“We test it out, try it out, see what value it has, and then we can see if we can scale it to other centres moving forwards,” the company said.
It appears the organisation is now taking that mindset and applying it across all areas of focus.
