Enhancing the benefits of shared services
A city of contrast, Krakow juxtaposes its traditional role as a leading center for Polish academia with its newer role as an emerging technology center. Just a stone’s throw from the historic Collegium Broscianum of the Jagellonian University in this southern Polish city famous for its well-preserved medieval architecture, stands a modern nine-story steel and glass building. Within this ultra-modern building’s sleek offices a scene of intensity, of highly focused activity unfolds daily. Individuals are talking on their telephone headsets in numerous languages. Others focus on their screens, tapping intently on keyboards. Excitement and activity permeate the air. This is the new Global Business Services center (GBS) in Krakow, one of the nerve centers in a global network supporting ABB’s customers and 132,000 employees.
Located in the state-of-the-art Axis office building in the heart of the city, the GBS center will employ a multilingual and multicultural workforce of more than 2,000 people when fully operational.
The dynamic center is one of six worldwide that provide specialized services to ABB’s business and country organizations around the globe. This GBS network has been established as part of ABB’s Next Level strategy, launched in 2014 to make the company faster, more agile and more customer-focused. The strategy’s goals include simpler, standardized processes to increase effectiveness and efficiency and to help drive growth. A key objective is to improve the quality and efficiency of the services provided to ABB’s businesses so they in turn can focus on innovation and enhancing their value proposition for customers, especially in terms of digital offerings for industry.
The GBS organization is pooling ABB’s vast experience in running 68 country-based shared service centers. It will provide dedicated services in the areas of Finance, Human Resources, Information Systems and Supply Chain Management.
By concentrating services and expertise in these six centers, and by developing a culture of service and continuous improvement, ABB is transforming the consistency and quality of operations in its support functions. This is consistent with the approach taken by other companies that have established a world-class GBS organization. The fundamental change in mindset about how shared services should be managed results in benefits that go far beyond cost reductions. A successful GBS delivers value and support at the strategic level.
While many large companies have adopted a shared services model in some part of their business, few have successfully integrated business services across all or most support functions into a fully-fledged GBS organization. The recent opening of the global GBS center in Krakow, marks an important step toward ABB’s achievement of a world-class GBS organization.
The network will have the agility of a start-up, with its own priorities and targets, while benefiting from the established industry leadership and best practices of ABB. This enables ABB to leverage its global scale and further improve the quality and efficiency of the services provided.
Two of the six GBS centers – Bangalore and Krakow – are global centers, meaning that they are able to draw on extensive talent pools with diverse language, intercultural and interpersonal skills, all of which are essential for running the global operations of such centers. However, each center will also include local functional representatives, who will deliver services to specific countries.
ABB already has a very strong presence in Krakow and the selection of this location for the largest center in the GBS network clearly demonstrates the company’s confidence in local skills, infrastructure and business conditions. This center will be one of the key milestones in supporting the transformation of ABB’s global functions.
The new building that houses ABB’s Krakow GBS is equipped with ABB intelligent home and building automation solutions, including air conditioning, ventilation, lighting systems and low voltage equipment. Its design cuts energy consumption by 25 percent and water consumption by 40 percent compared with conventional designs.
