Efficiency and standardization can be difficult to achieve for large companies with global operations such as Severstal. Local business units often develop their own ways of doing things to address specific contexts and challenges, which can have unintended negative consequences—such as increased complexity, difficulty gaining a true understanding of performance, and duplicated processes and activities. These developments inflate costs; more important, they can sacrifice a global company’s ability to understand, control, and improve its overall performance, or respond with agility to changing conditions and goals.
Severstal was aware of these risks. The company faced challenges in gauging HR effectiveness, as well as maintaining consistency across its HR processes and applications across business units—thus limiting its ability to access and use HR-related information.
The company understood the potential of shared services to overcome these challenges, having recently implemented the model for finance and accounting functions. However, at the time of the project’s launch, no Russian business had yet applied shared services within human resources. Given the pioneering nature of the project, Severstal wanted to work with a company experienced in HR shared services design and implementation, and chose Accenture to be its ally in this important initiative.
Severstal selected Accenture for a number of reasons, including Accenture’s deep skills in human resources and shared services, extensive experience working with mining companies and relevant Russian businesses, and Accenture’s focus on business value and on supporting high performance.