Industrializing HR Business Process Outsourcing Services to Drive High Performance

In this paper, Gene Shuldes, Payroll Lead for HR BPO, Accenture, outlines the ways to achieve this goal.

Cost overruns, low quality and scheduling troubles continue to be issues in HR BPO. Accenture believes that the primary cause of these problems is that HR has been among the last business functions to embrace the principles of industrialization.

When applied to HR, industrialization refers to the extreme predictability associated with an industrialized manufacturing environment. Just as a worker on an automotive assembly line knows exactly what to do with his or her tools or assembly parts, so an HR case worker should be able to settle 99.9 percent of cases quickly and routinely. This is the kind of service an organization should expect to receive from its HR BPO provider.

Accenture’s research and experience show that HR industrialization can be managed and measured in three dimensions:

• Decreasing costs. A lean supplier drives up its own internal profitability, enabling it to pass on cost savings to customers. Cost levers include the ability to move resources within an operation to accommodate fluctuating demand and to place the right skills at the right places at the right cost.
  
  
• Improving quality. Quality and productivity need no longer be mutually exclusive—rather, operations managers must be given the quality and productivity data to manage their teams effectively.
  
  
• Increasing speed. In this context, speed denotes the overall time it takes for any process to be completed. In Accenture’s experience, successful HR BPO is based, in part, on applying supply chain management principles to managing inventory—here understood to be the personnel actions that need to be processed, benefit casework that needs to be done, payroll transactions, payroll processing, incoming call volume and so on.

The key to success in industrializing HR BPO is measurement. Companies should:

• Define processes and steps to be measured in a more detailed way and at a granular level.
  
  
• Communicate and educate relentlessly.
  
  
• Hold leaders accountable.

HR BPO industrialization can generate impressive benefits for companies on the journey to high performance. In one instance, Accenture helped a government organization save $14 million while raising customer satisfaction levels and reducing employee attrition.

Contact us to find out how Accenture can help you industrialize HR BPO to support your drive to high performance.

Gene Shuldes, Accenture Global Payroll Lead for HR BPO, has 18-plus years of experience in shaping strategies that assure the alignment of governance, business processes, management systems, organizational structures and leadership competencies with the expectations of diverse stakeholders. He joined Accenture as the director of operations for a government HR BPO engagement and is now senior executive responsible for HR BPO operations for the Americas. He is also globally responsible for HR BPO controls and compliance.