As I mentioned in my
New roles, such as the Global Process Owner, will emerge to ensure new finance technologies integrate and benefit the companys overall effectiveness across end-to-end processes such as procure-to-pay.
While this position already exists, it is becoming more crucial to global enterprises and their efforts to standardize and implement financial controls globally. It will be one of the positions that most large enterprises will be adding to payroll in 2015.
The key to the GPO role is end-to-end process ownership in order to ensure an effective process but also to better understand and impact cost, performance and risk drivers. Key benefits of process ownership include access to valuable and actionable data and the elimination of functional silos that exist in most companies.
GPOs will lead the efforts to make sure that key processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and hire-to-retire are continuously improving. With procure-to-pay, a GPO would be able to bring multiple stakeholders such as accounts payable, procurement, finance and IT together with shared goals and responsibilities.
They would also take into consideration all supplier-facing processes and ensure that this very important group is serviced well. GPOs will have a strong grasp on how to approach analytics, ensuring that processes are continuously improving performance wise and KPIs are regularly monitored.
Candidates for the GPO role include people with functional experience, strategic vision and tech savviness. The position requires meticulous attention to detail, ability to see the big picture, a passion for efficiency, and elegant, effective solutions.
In my opinion, the best GPOs will be tech-driven, constantly searching for new and exciting ways to improve and simplify processes, while building stronger relationships between functions and externally with suppliers.
In 2015, I expect that the Global Business Services (GBS) will gain more traction and will be adopted by more global organizations. The GPO model will be better understood and enterprises will have a clear picture of what process ownership entails. The increase in GPO roles will help impact business processes across the enterprise, promote standardization with appropriate localized approaches and generate volumes of data.
In 2015, as finance and payments technology advance, the GPO role will become a necessity, rather than a possibility and large enterprises should begin planning for their new colleague now.
Christian Lanng is CEO of Tradeshift.
