Data, First, Shared, Services, Patmore, Kim, CFO
Case Study #3: Kim Patmore, CFO, First Data Corp.
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Former Western Union CFO Kim Patmore launched a quiet revolution following the merger of payment services firms First Data and Western Union. In 1996, she was given the task of merging finance and accounting staff from both companies into a First Data shared services centre.
Moving into her role as CFO of First Data, Patmore set about motivating employees to focus on process improvement, partnerships and other initiatives. She achieved her objective through a mentoring programme, which matched experienced, senior employees with their junior counterparts, encouraging them to impart knowledge, and in the process, improve productivity.The result? Over and above the usual benefits of operating a shared services centre, Patmore’s mentoring programme reduced training costs, improved productivity, drastically shrunk claims for overtime pay and reduced turnover rates from 12 to eight percent. As a result of her innovation, Patmore earned the 2000 CFO Excellence Award for Training/Building a Finance Team.
Looking at the next level
In the process of evolving to a shared services model, both management and employees will need to learn new tricks – technically and personally. At this juncture, an executive officer needs to facilitate training and on-the-job learning in order to generate the skills necessary to keep shared services thriving.
“In the process of evolving to a shared services model, both management and employees will need to learn new tricks – technically and personally. At this juncture, an executive officer needs to facilitate training and on-the-job learning in order to generate the skills necessary to keep shared services thriving.”
Once a shared services the centre is up and running, automation will not only cut back on duplication, but will free up resources, enabling employees to learn new skills. Ultimately, the reduction in repetitive data-gathering tasks will give employees more time to obtain and analyse value-oriented information. The shared services centre will also help a CEO in developing performance measures, best practices and in setting career paths for promising employees.
Okay, so the establishment of a shared services centre may sound at this point like a bit of a panacea. The reality is that it takes a lot of attentive hard work to shift from an old to a new business model. Major organisational restructuring is like herding cats – many employees will be suspicious, and will try to claw their way back to the old way of doing things. This is in the nature of human responses to change.
However, all it takes is research into the success stories behind a shared services business model to realise that the initial growing pains are worth the effort for any organisation that wrestles with a sluggish business model and high administrative costs. Shared services centres and BPO work, and no one is more qualified to lead the transition than an organisation’s corporate leaders.
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