Showcase : Service Design
Commercial-Finance Ops Reimagined
Knowledge management and experience strategy for the commercial finance ops group of a global beverage leader with a vast and diverse product portfolio
Problem Statement
The company’s global commercial finance ops group faced significant challenges due to Covid-19, a shrinking workforce from cost cutting measures, high attrition and an increased dependence on outsourcing and technology. This affected its customers, suppliers, employees and ultimately - the company’s growth objectives.
The company embarked on a complex digital transformation project that involved significant reorganization and retooling across its global subsidiaries in to gain strategic business agility.
As part of the effort the company developed a roadmap for knowledge management and experience strategy, which I had the opportunity to lead and help create.
Key Activities
Objectives: Develop a knowledge management and experience strategy for a global digital transformation of commercial-finance ops at a Fortune 100 firm.
Baselining: Understanding Current-State
Selective domain research on mission-critical commercial finance processes across the company’s global divisions
Stakeholder and SME interviews (global markets)
Painpoint-Impact mapping
Persona and knowledge space development
Current-state journey maps
Validation and alignment with senior leadership
Vision-State Strategy Development and Validation
Design Thinking activities
Vision state cross-persona processes and workflows
Domain knowledge onboarding, transfer, retrieval, update and archiving
‘Day in the Life’ simulations: Current and visions state videos
Strategy presentations to firm’s senior global leadership
Outcomes
The work has been enthusiastically received and praised, and served its primary objective as an important alignment tool for the firm’s executive leadership, key internal stakeholders, business partners and customers.
SAMPLES
‘A Day in the Life’
Articulating the strategy by visualizing current and vision states
Current-State Experience
Re-Imagined Experience
Why Process Maps Don’t Cut It
Above is a typical boxes-and-arrows type of a process flow diagram. While these diagrams provide a rapid, standardized means to abstract any process and are often created in projects, they fail to capture the details of pain-points between people, processes, and the systems that are used.
Service design blueprints (SDB) offer a comprehensive visualization of the intricacies of interactions between all parties involved, making it possible to identify stress-points, process breakdowns, and inefficiencies. Consequently, SDBs are an extremely effective communication tool to align all stakeholders around a unified approach strategy, prioritization of efforts, and better outcomes overall.