Published on March 13, 2020
Tata Power’s shared services centre at Mumbai was established in 2016-17. After 4 years of efficient functioning of the centre, Tata Power reached out to Tata Business Excellence Group (TBExG) to seek the promising practices from other Tata companies in the area of shared services. Accordingly, on February 6, 2020, TBExG facilitated the visit of a 10-member delegation from Tata Power to the Tata Motors Global Delivery Center (GDC) at Pune. Debashis Roy, Head, Finance Center of Excellence, led the delegation, whose objective was to understand process benchmarking, digital platforms, automation tools and other value-added services.
In addition to being a cost-saving function, GDC is also considered a strategic partner for revenue generation. Over the years, GDC has extended its solutions in the areas of value creation through data analysis, decision support, process transformations and automation.
During the interaction, Aarti Desai, Head - GDC, explained how the shared services unit provides transactional backend support and has moved towards value creation through segregation of transaction delivery and process excellence. The team helps the company achieve cost optimisation and process efficiency goals by:
- Streamlining, standardising and automating business processes for increased efficiency, visibility and controls
- Delivering SLA-based transaction services in routine processes like ‘Hire to Retire’, ‘Procure to Pay’, ‘Record to Report’ and ‘Order to Cash’ to enable optimum utilisation of manpower
- Analysing transactional data, developing and deploying data models and dashboards to enable better decision making
Ravindra Pethe, General Manager, Tata Motors, and his team explained the process benchmarking of critical functions including payables, fixed asset management, receivables, cash and bank management and treasury operations. The team from Tata Power also understood how GDC uses the American Productivity and Quality Center to benchmark its operations and cost.
Dr Pradeep Chatterjee, leading digital transformation in GDC, demonstrated several technological solutions deployed at GDC, including:
- E-KYC
- Inventory management in warehouse and stores
- Customer call analysis through AI
- QR-based auto GRN at all plant storage location
- Intelligent conversational chat bot for employees
- System-based checklist for ensuring CKD car transport
- Analysis and highlight of contractual obligation (penalty)
- Contractual agreement template and library of clauses
- Algorithm-based image classification
Post this visit, Tata Power aspires to adopt several practices from Tata Motors GDC including segregation of transaction delivery and process excellence, contract modification outsourced to contractual FTEs, vendor master management final approval, E-KYC, etc.
Participant Speak
On behalf of my team, I thank the unit at GDC for coordinating such a fascinating knowledge-sharing session. It was a unique and immensely inspiring experience. We are poised to change some existing processes, for which we received insights by interacting with GDC team members. We have also gained substantially by looking into their expertise and experiencing a process of transformation from the transaction processing centre to value-creation centre.
— Debashis Roy, Head - Finance Center of Excellence