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Shared Services: Changing Faster Than Ever!

The ongoing changes in innovation, analysis, process and automation of the shared services industry have resulted in the need for an even greater transformation.  In partnership with SSON, Chazey Partners is pleased to share with you the State of the Global Shared Services Market Report 2019.  It updates the research on the trends and characteristics of today’s Shared Services Organizations (SSOs) and highlights five core areas that guide the modern Shared Services Operating model:

1. SSO Landscape and Operating Model
2. Strategy
3. Talent
4. Automation and the Digital Workforce
5. Tomorrow’s Brave New World: How Ready Are You?

What is clear from this report and from Chazey’s own research and experience is that things are moving faster than ever. Changes that previously occurred over many years are now happening over months or a few short years, and some organizations are leapfrogging previous steps to achieve the maximum potential opportunity in the shortest possible timescale. The report has also highlighted several key trends that are re-shaping the shared services world:

• A significant and growing interest in pursuing Global Business Services (GBS) as an achievable model.
• Innovation and productivity improvements are also top of the agenda for today’s SSOs.
• New technology is really disrupting the Shared Services and Outsourcing space, including Intelligent Automation (IA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
• Social media and the need for mobile solutions are also driving technology adoption and associated standardization of business processes.
• “Big data” and data analytics have become a significant value-add opportunity.  This has been supported by the growing use and development of Centers of Expertise/Excellence (COEs), which focus more on “professional and technical” as opposed to “transactional and administrative” services and activities.
• With the flattening of the labor arbitrage opportunity and the potential for achieving what we have been calling “robotic arbitrage”, the desire to move to lower cost, offshore locations, especially to third party outsourcers, for broad service lines and process execution has been declining.
• Innovation, analysis, process and automation related skills and experience are leading the pack for future SSOs.

The State of Shared Services report is the 3rd in a series of market insights produced by SSON and Chazey Partners. The other two reports are:

• 7 Steps to Successfully Deploying RPA in Your Enterprise.
• Global Business Services – Transformation Driver & Digital Enabler

Given the fast-paced, tech-driven and uncertain, inter-connected world we are living in, and rapidly shifting stakeholder demands and macro circumstances (economic, environmental, health, and political), the importance of “Finance as a Service” is becoming ever more important. The next generation finance function needs to transform and adapt to provide partnership, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability and efficiency, as well as still delivering on its more traditional accounting, compliance and control responsibilities.

So, how can you transform your finance function, drive your continuous improvement and digitalization efforts, and leverage all of the tools at your disposal to establish your finance function as a valued and trusted business partner?

Join us for a powerful session where we will cover:

• From “Back-Office” to “One-Office” – proactively moving up the value-chain to support enterprise-wide decision making
• The role of predictive analytics, intelligent automation, and digitalization on your future operations
• How to create Finance teams who are trusted experts in their field

Presenter:

• Phil Searle, CEO, Chazey Partners
• Esteban Carri, Principal, Latin America, Chazey Partners

This webinar is part of the 24th North America Shared Services & Outsourcing Week by SSON.

This webinar has now finished, and is available to watch below:

Download the Presentation

CAMPBELL, CALIF. APRIL 14, 2019

Chazey Partners, a global management consulting firm specializing in Shared Services, Business Transformation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON), the largest and most established community of global shared services and outsourcing professionals, are thrilled to announce the release of the State of Global Shared Services Market Report 2019. The report provides an extensive update on current state and latest trends in global Shared Services, including those relating to the Shared Services landscape and operating model, strategy, talent, automation and the digital workforce, and what is likely to happen next.

The State of Shared Services report is the 3rd in a series of market insights produced by SSON and Chazey Partners. Earlier this year, the two organizations partnered to produce an ebook titled 7 Steps to Successfully Deploying RPA in Your Enterprise. This guide provides practical information for organizations starting the RPA Journey, including key steps for implementation, case studies and lessons learned from planning and launching.

The third report in the series, Global Business Services – Transformation Driver & Digital Enabler, provides insights into the current state and landscape of Global Business Services (GBS). The report includes information on actual organizations’ strategy, structure, transformation process, value achieved and use of data analytics and intelligent automation, all related to GBS.

“We are very excited to be able to leverage our team’s first-hand experience as shared services and digital automation practitioners and consultants to help create these reports,” stated Phil Searle, CEO & Founder of Chazey Partners. “We have a longstanding and excellent relationship with SSON, and we are very proud of the valuable research and learning tools produced through this partnership.”

About Chazey Partners
Chazey Partners is a practitioners-led global management consulting firm. Founded in 2006, Chazey Partners supports public and private sector clients with shared services, business transformation, technology enablement, intelligent automation, digital transformation, enterprise wide security and sourcing advisory around the world. Chazey Partners has been a recognized leader in these fields for many years, and was recently recognized by CIOReview as one of the 20 most promising Robotics solution providers. Leverage our experience for your success. For additional information, please visit us at https://chazeypartners.com/.

About SSON
The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) is the largest and most established community of Shared Services and Outsourcing professionals in the world, with over 140,000 members.

Established in 1999, SSON recognized the revolution in support services as it was happening, and realized that a forum was needed through which practitioners could connect with each other on a regional and global basis.

SSON is a one-stop shop for Shared Services professionals, offering industry-leading events, reports, surveys, interviews, white papers, videos, and editorial, as well as real-time access to benchmarking and industry data via SSON Analytics.

Chazey Partners, a global management consulting firm, is delighted to announce a new partnership with AntWorks, a provider of fully integrated Intelligent Automation solutions, powered by fractal science.  This new partnership is representative of the two organizations’ aligned view that intelligent automation solutions are best designed to transform entire end-to-end processes, and deliver enterprise-wide scalability for customers, as opposed to solely focusing on discrete activities.

24th January, California, US – Chazey Partners has entered into a partnership with AntWorks, provider of integrated artificial intelligence and intelligent automation solutions, to deliver on the promise of enterprise-wide, scalable, intelligent automation, combined with increased data ingestion accuracy, and low/no coding requirements.

Through this partnership, Chazey Partners and AntWorks will drive further value for clients in North America and around the World, using AntWorks’ full stack, integrated Intelligent Automation solutions, designed to increase the ability to scale results across whole enterprises at less cost, increased speed and with greater accuracy.  In contrast to traditional RPA tools (now increasingly becoming referred to in industry as Gen 1.0 technology) AntWorks’ Gen 2.0 solutions integrate a suite of AI technologies, including machine vision, machine learning, deep learning and natural language modelling (NLM), natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG).

This integrated approach to intelligent automation also leverages Cognitive Machine Reading to allow data to become ingested in any form (including structured, semi-structured, unstructured, inferred and images) which radically improves the quality and accuracy of data being used at the start of the automation process.

“At Chazey Partners we are delighted with this new partnership.  AntWorks’ is a leader in the Intelligent Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, space, which is growing rapidly and offering significant benefits to businesses everywhere” stated Phil Searle, Founder and CEO of Chazey Partners. “We are excited to leverage AntWorks’ technology as part of our solution toolkit, to continue to improve and enhance automation of end-to-end processes for our clients, delivering dramatic payback and enabling better, more intuitive and faster decision making.”

AntWorks CEO and Co-Founder, Asheesh Mehra, commented “Our philosophy at AntWorks has always been to approach automation from the perspective of the process owner. We have absolute confidence that our integrated platform offers enterprises a truly unique solution to automating business processes end-to-end. We are delighted that Chazey Partners, renowned for their practitioner-based expertise in business service delivery and continuous process improvement, has chosen to partner with AntWorks to ensure we can transform our clients’ digital journeys seamlessly together”.

About Chazey Partners

Chazey Partners is a practitioners-led global management consulting firm supporting Shared Services, Business Transformation and Intelligent Automation.  Chazey Partners’ Automation Methodology can support all phases of your automation transformation to ensure an appropriate strategy and program for delivering tangible, lasting benefits and return on investment.

We pride ourselves in helping businesses and public sector organizations achieve operational excellence in the delivery of mission-critical business services; including Finance, HR, IT, Procurement, Facilities Management, Customer Helpdesk, and many other support services. For over 14 years, Chazey Partners has helped our clients implement successful service delivery solutions in the US & Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania and Asia.  Leverage our experience for your success. For additional information please visit us at www.chazeypartners.com.

About AntWorks

AntWorks^TM are a global, artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation company; creating new possibilities with data through digitization, automation, and enterprise intelligence. As the World’s only platform that understands every data type, ™ digitizes every bit of information for a diverse range of industries. By creating human-like bots in a low-code / no-code environment, ANTstein™ innovates new ways to automate complex processes. AntWorks’ solutions power up enterprises with accurate insights through an integrated, intelligent, technology stack that automates and learns independently. Put simply, it accelerates the new, constantly. ANTstein™ is also the first and singular Enterprise Intelligent Automation Platform powered by fractal science principles and pattern recognition.

Shared Services and Outsourcing Week is one community, coming together to break down silos to create knowledge-sharing that helps shared service, outsourcing and global business professionals take their organizations beyond cost-savings and efficiency.Chazey Partners is proud to be a partner and sponsor of the North America Shared Services and Outsourcing Week this year again.  We will be leading a two-hour long workshop (Workshop D, 8:00 am – 10:00 am, March 12^th,2019) which offers you strategic approaches, actionable tips, interactive discussions and recent case studies.

Workshop: Roadmap for Your First 12 to 18 Months of RPA Implementation

Robotic Process Automation can provide significant benefits to SSOs looking to automate processes, increase productivity and free up hours to take on more value added work. So, how do you get started? What do you do once you’ve got your first bot in place? What comes next? What trends do you need to be thinking about in this evolving area? This session is ideal for those that are launching, or have their first few bots and are looking to expand to many more.

In this workshop, participants will:

• Explore the most common goals of implementing RPA as well as the risks involved
• Discuss how to ‘sell’ RPA to stakeholders when launching, and how to gain support for growing your program
• Dissect lessons learned from planning and implementation
• Examine how to select and assemble robots in a process with workflow and process orchestration
• Outline the trends you need to be aware of for the next 12 to 24 months

Presenters:

• Phil Searle, Founder & CEO, Chazey Partners
• Craig Ackerman, Head of the Global RPA Practice, Chazey Partners

For more details about the event, please visit the event website.

Chazey Partners, a global management consulting firm, is pleased to announce a new partnership with Automation Anywhere, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), to offer organizations across the world unrivaled support for their digital workforce strategy and best-of-breed RPA implementations.

As part of the agreement, Chazey Partners will use Automation Anywhere software to provide robotic process automation solutions to its clients globally, offering RPA advisory services, accelerated implementation, global deployment, Center of Excellence (CoE) set up, robotics training and automation support services.

“Chazey Partners has been supporting our clients’ RPA implementation needs for several years now.  The support we provide ranges from initial process suitability assessment, through solution implementation and training, and on to scaling up capabilities,” commented Phil Searle, Founder and CEO of Chazey Partners. “By formalizing this alliance with Automaton Anywhere, we are able to offer our clients this world-class RPA solution and award winning technology.  We are very excited about this partnership and look forward to collaborating with Automation Anywhere to drive the next level of growth and excellence in RPA and intelligent automation.”

“Chazey Partners is an acclaimed consulting partner in business transformation, shared services, change management and operational excellence. Their proven methodologies, rich experience and comprehensive RPA implementation approach will truly complement the value of our technologies and greatly benefit our clients worldwide,” commented Anubhav Saxena, EVP, Partnerships, Strategy and Operations at Automation Anywhere.

About Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is the leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the platform on which more organizations build world-class Intelligent Digital Workforces. Automation Anywhere’s enterprise-grade platform uses software bots that work side by side with people to do much of the repetitive work in many industries. It combines sophisticated RPA, cognitive and embedded analytic technologies. Over 1,400 organizations use this AI-enabled solution to manage and scale business processes faster, with near-zero error rates, while dramatically reducing operational costs. Automation Anywhere provides automation technology to leading financial services, insurance, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, telecom and logistics companies globally. For additional information, visit www.automationanywhere.com.

About Chazey Partners

Chazey Partners is a practitioners-led global management consulting and advisory services firm. We bring a unique blend of real life, practical, hands on experience, empowering our clients to strive for world class excellence through Shared Services, Business Transformation and Intelligent Automation. We pride ourselves in helping businesses and public sector organizations achieve operational excellence in the delivery of mission-critical business services including Finance, HR, IT, Procurement, Facilities Management, Customer Helpdesk, and many other support services.  For over twelve years, Chazey Partners has helped our clients implement successful service delivery solutions in the US & Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania and Asia.

For more about Chazey Partners’ Robotic Process Automation solutions, visit here.

The Shared Services Higher Education Charlotte (SSHE Charlotte) event, organized by the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) is designed to address the challenges and opportunities in building and implementing shared services faced by shared services organizations in higher education.  Industry leaders from Yale University, Emory University, University of Michigan and many more will be presenting a multitude of shared services strategies that address the potential solutions to overcome these challenges and hurdles.

Chazey Partners is proud to be a partner and sponsor of the event this year again.  We will be leading a workshop which offers you strategic approaches, actionable tips, interactive discussions and recent case studies.

Workshpo B: 10:30am – 12:15pm, November 28th, Wednesday

Intelligent Automatoin Bootcamp

While Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been the buzzword for the past few years, it has become clear that the question of “Is it just hype?” has been laid to rest.  Instead, the question is “How your institution can leverage RPA, cognitive and AI technologies?”

This Boot Camp will discuss what is involved in establishing an intelligent automation program, including: the benefits it can provide, the roadblocks to its success and its potential to add value to your institution.

By attending this workshop, you will learn about:

• Intelligent automation’s capabilities and what it can offer in the years to come
• How the technology works including a real-live demo and solution provider comparison
• Applicable processes that can utilize these technologies and case studies of successful implementation
• How to develop a stakeholder engagement plan and a robust business case
• How to determine a realistic timeline for your intelligent automation journey

Presenters:

• Phil Searle, Founder & CEO, Chazey Partners
• Craig Ackerman, Global Head of RPA Practice, Chazey Partners

For more information about the event, please visit The Shared Services Higher Education Charlotte (SSHE Charlotte)

To learn Chazey’s capabilities in higher education, click here

RELEVANT READING

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Developing a sound, persuasive evidence-driven Business Case for your Shared Services start up and continued success.

Chazey Partners is proud to be part of IQPC’s Intelligent Automation Week Austin after delivering an IA workshop at its sister event Intelligent Automation Week Chicago in July.

At this event, we will be leading a two-hours long workshop which offers attendees strategic approaches, actionable tips, interactive discussions and recent case studies.

8:30 am – 10:15 am, December 3rd, Workshop B

ESTABLISH & MANAGE A BEST IN CLASS INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION CoE (CENTER of EXCELLENCE)

Is your organization evaluating the need to establish a CoE for your IA program, and/or would like to increase its effectiveness? If so, then this deep dive CoE session is a perfect way to learn more about how to do just that. In this session, we will discuss:

• Various CoE models, such as: hybrid, functional, etc.
• How to establish (or enhance) an effective governance and centralized structure to support your organization’s intelligent automation CoE
• Effective CoE and governance process models
• Risk, Controls & Audits
• Chargeback models and would they work for your CoE
• Methods to successfully develop and manage effective change management initiatives – and effective PR, marketing and communication plan.

Speakers:

Phil Searle, CEO & Founder, Chazey Partners

Craig Ackerman, Global Head of RPA, Chazey Partners

>> View Chazey Partners Robotic Process Automation solution and capabilities

RELEVANT READING

Intelligent Automation Process Selection 101

Four best practices for your Intelligent Automation journey

RPA is potentially a game changer but …

How to determine if & when your IA initiatives might be ready for a Center of Expertise

Build an RPA Strategy for Your SSO Operations

Phil Searle, CEO & Founder of Chazey Partners, a global management consulting and advisory services firm headquartered in California, has been recognized as a “Leader of Change” by the California Higher Education Collaborative (CHEC) Conference Planning Committee.

Mr. Searle received his award at CHEC’s evening reception during its annual conference, on October 1st, 2018, at Sonoma State University. Past recipients of this award include California Assembly member Mark Levine and CSU Board of Trustees member and president of ECMC Foundation, Peter Taylor. Ron Coley, Vice Chancellor, Business and Administrative Services at University of California, Riverside was also recognized at the reception.

First convened in 2013, the CHEC brings staff together from across California public higher education to share emerging practices, collaborate on opportunities for process innovations that work, and improve service to students, faculty, and fellow staff. CHEC advocates cross-campus and cross-system/regional collaborations.

“We are very pleased to recognize Phil Searle as a ‘Leader of Change’. This is the sixth year of our conference, and Mr. Searle and Chazey Partners have not only advocated for innovation and efficiency throughout California higher education since our first event, but have also directly advised individual projects, campuses and system-wide efforts to improve service and outcomes.” Commented Cathy O’Sullivan, Chief of Staff to the Chief Operating Officer, University of California Office of the President. “Phil has brought his rich and practical experience from the private sector that he has gained over the years. He is among the rare individuals that can really understand higher education.”

Picture: Phil Searle (holding the award) with Cathy O’Sullivan, together with Mike Redmond (to the right of Phil) and Jorge Burwick (to the left of Cathy) of the California Higher Education Collaborative (CHEC) Conference Planning Committee

“I am very honored to receive this award”, commented Phil Searle, “I have really enjoyed being involved in the California Higher Education Collaborative since 2013, and working with so many inspirational and passionate colleagues across the three systems.  It is wonderful to have seen first-hand the growth, impact and ongoing potential of the CHEC event, and to have witnessed the excellent collaboration within and between institutions throughout California.  The CHEC goal to support the three segments of California public higher education with exchange of ideas and best practices, to help improve administrative performance, service, and outcomes, is a worthy one.  All to support the mission of providing quality education, research and health services, as well as the communities within which we live and work.”

As an advisory firm specializing in shared services, business transformation and Robotic Process Automation, Chazey Partners is proud to support this event year after year, sharing its hands-on experience, proven methodology and practical approach to back-office transformation in higher education.  Chazey has worked with several California higher education, research and health institutions, including University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), University of California Office of the President (UCOP), University of California, Davis (UCD), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), as well as universities and systems in other states across the US.

For more information on the CHEC’s event, please visit https://uknowledgeshare.com/.

For more information on Chazey Partners’ higher education specific projects, please visit https://chazeypartners.com/higher-education/

About Chazey Partners

Chazey Partners is a practitioners-led global management consulting and advisory services firm. We bring a unique blend of real life, practical, hands on experience, empowering our clients to strive for world class excellence through Shared Services, Business Transformation and Intelligent Automation. We pride ourselves in helping businesses and public sector organizations achieve operational excellence in the delivery of mission-critical business services; including Finance, HR, IT, Procurement, Facilities Management, Customer Helpdesk, and many other support services.  For over twelve years, Chazey Partners has helped our clients implement successful service delivery solutions; in the US & Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania and Asia.