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Glen Skarott joins us from SSOW and shares that he’s the head of finance shared services within the financial management group and he also leads corporate reporting- which makes him responsible for all of Macquarie’s external reporting for the 1,500 entities around the world...and the position includes regulatory reporting in 40 odd countries. Although he’s based in Sydney, he does obviously oversee the two shared services hubs in India and Jacksonville, FL. The Florida location has been open for over two years and was established after Glen and his team toured South America, Central and Eastern Europe. Jacksonville is where they felt skill set met the level service they need to supply.

Dariusz Bazeli oversees shared services in Gdynia and Wroclaw Poland respectively. He grew up in an operational role and that’s where his heart is, so he sees his role as a manager of operations with his operations directors. At the same time, he has the responsibility of overseeing those support functions of finance, IT, HR. And as Geoban is part of Santander, in that banking environment, Dariusz is most focused on control, ensuring that processes are secure, correct and compliant. And like everyone else in central and Eastern Europe, Dariusz and the organization are concerned with positioning the brand to ensure it’s as attractive as possible to the best talent available.  

Katarzyna Szaroleta of DFDS joins us from SSOW in Budapest and shares that the HR role is quite wide and complex. She notes her main responsibility as helping managers become better managers. And so she sees her role as that of a coach or adviser. Katarzyna helps develop skills and talents while avoiding mistakes. A Team leader is  traditionally a former SME’s who is an operationally talented person. Managing soft skills is where the rubber meets the road for a would be successful manager- and Katarzyna points out that these skills can be taught if the manager in question has a predisposition for that side of management. From there, Katerzyna is managing personality types for ultimate success.

Peter Csucska, the General Manager Business Services Lexmark joins us from SSOW where he shares that his top priority is "challenging the way we work.” He’s pretty confident that the organization’s GBS model is robust. When it works well though, a level of comfort drifts in, and so Peter says at points “we got too comfortable.” Which has led him to ensure that every 3-4 years the team evaluates the shared services strategy, revises that strategy and moves forward. Past performance is of course, not a guarantee for future performance. Understanding that, however, over the past decade Peter and the team have established a service center plus.

The Director of Contact Center for Global Services for Johnson & Johnson Katerina Vranovska joins us from Shared Services Eastern Europe in Budapest where she shares that her function was once internally facing and now she services external clients. Based in Prague, the organization is in the process of building a customer service shared service business right there in the Czech Republic. The global services center in Prague is already successful so the business is ready to be built there and Katerina suggests that the city and country itself is a calling card for the business as nearly 50% of J&J employees are foreign workers.

Viral Chhaya joins us from SSOW where he shares his history. After initially deciding not to be an engineer, Viral eventually wound up with a six sigma black belt when he landed a job with Jack Welch’s GE. He notes that when he joined the organization it was like university all over again as only the best and brightest got allocated to six sigma where the team trained you. Viral’s job as he saw it was to be open and willing to learn and then willing to deploy. As it turned out, he got is black belt just before 9/11 when no one’s agenda included business continuity planning and disaster recovery processes. But then of course, BCPDRP shot to the top of everyone’s list. GE needed certified talent to head those initiatives and Viral was lucky enough to head it up in India. He’s taken that experience forward in his career.

A bit of a troubadour early on, Melissa Leon joins us and shares that she loved the idea of driving across the country and stopping in at a TGIFriday’s along the way and waitressing that night. When off the road, Melissa took a job as a teller which along with a degree in hospitality, led to a finance job in hospitality which led her to a management position in housekeeping which she intensely disliked. They moved her into a management role in room service which also didn’t click. But, she got the taste for managing spreadsheets in room service which the controller of the hotel noticed and asked her if she’d like to join the accounting department. Which is where she landed and it clicked. Four Seasons recruited her where she has spent time in Hawaii, Miami and Los Angeles until she landed a job in shared services in Arizona.

The Head of Sourcing & Procurement for Silicon Valley Bank, Steven Jo joins us. Being in finance, he’s not out front in a customer facing role, but he does feel that everything he does leads to some client benefit- such as improving the ability to support clients, ensuring services are consistently delivered in a timely fashion, keeping costs down to service clients at an attractive price point, etc. Adding intrigue to his day is that he’s sometimes a client for his client’s products and services which means that he does have a nice bird’s eye view of what’s next in technology trends. Which means that buzzwords for you are clients for him.

The Vice President of Finance Systems for the CEO Office at Oracle, Loren Mahon joins us and shares that she’s chartered with internal business transformation internally at Oracle, particularly around things that impact financial systems and processes- which she points out- for any enterprise sized company- is almost anything. But particularly- the internal cloud strategy, looking at enterprise reporting strategy, data governance, M&A integration, etc and how that all links back to what’s being done from a systems, process and shared services perspective. Overall Loren and her team have four steps for business transformation- simplify, standardize, centralize and automate.

Recently retired EVP & CFO of Revlon Inc, Juan Figuereo joins us and notes that upon reflection the shared services industry is in a very good place. There are many options and with RPA there’s a new world of opportunity to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and improve capabilities. Juan shares that typically, the Fortune 500 tend to be more progressive, they’re more focused on cost efficiency and looking forward- so they’re ready for automation. In his opinion processes do not need to be optimized in order to automate. But that comes hand in hand with outsourcing those processes for automation. Regarding his CFO role, it was aspects of the strategic agenda that kept him up at night. Back office only came into his mind if he was concerned with something…if something was going wrong.