Support functions live at the center of a company but are rarely centered around value. BCG develops the vision, capabilities, and processes that allow support functions—such as digital shared services, finance, HR, and procurement—to spark growth and resilience while containing costs.
Savvy companies are extracting value from their own backyard—or, more precisely, back office. Through new approaches to business support functions, they’re achieving dramatic increases in productivity and cost reduction. They’re delivering better services faster. And they’re giving back time to employees—so they can focus on the work that spurs growth.
Transforming support functions isn’t just about going digital. It’s also about designing user-centric processes and applying the right mix of automation, simplification, and organizational change. BCG develops the technical and human enablers—the strategy, technology, and operating model—that help companies add value through digital shared services and support functions.
We take a holistic approach to optimizing business support functions, orchestrating the many capabilities, processes, and behaviors that come into play. We also help companies identify the moments that matter for customers and employees, so they can radically prioritize excellent services at those times. Our work aims to solve five major client challenges, taking companies from strategy to implementation, while enabling them to keep the momentum going once we hand over the reins.
We’ve helped many companies, across industries and geographies, transform their business support functions. Some examples include:
A Global Biopharma Company. We designed and implemented user-centric end-to-end processes, including procure to pay and order to cash. The digitized, simplified support functions sparked an improvement in quality and a 40% reduction in cost—and gave back approximately three days’ worth of time per month to managers.
A Global Mining Company. A global organization with distributed talent acquisition teams required 70 days, on average, to fill a vacancy. Through hire-to-retire process transformation, we reduced that period to 20 days—while saving line managers 60,000 administrative hours.
BCG’s digital support functions consulting combines industry-specific knowledge with expertise in such areas as digital technologies, organizational design, and change management. We also draw upon the resources of our tech build and design unit, BCG X—including technologists, scientists, programmers, engineers, and human-centered designers. The result: we don’t just identify the most promising use cases for the digital back office. We accelerate them. Our teams are supported by an array of proprietary tools.
Digital Accelerators and User Journey Mockups. Our accelerators are standalone digital products that can be tailored to specific client needs. They deliver quick impact to inspire and fund the journey of a larger transformation. Our interactive mockups help envision the future by showcasing the possible with reinvented and digitized E2E processes (hire to retire, order to cash, procure to pay, contact to resolve, record to report, and financial planning and analysis).
ABO by BCG. Our activity-based optimization software helps uncover inefficiencies and issues in the organization and identify suitable solutions. ABO combines powerful methodologies and software and benchmark data to provide a turnkey course for your client’s organizational improvement efforts.
Digital Maturity Assessment Tools. Our Digital Acceleration Index and digital and data platform maturity assessment toolbox help determine where our clients are in their digital transformation journeys and what steps they’ll need to take to get to where they want to go.
Benchmarking in Excellent Support Functions and Nonpersonnel Costs. This proprietary, web-based database leverages benchmarks for full-time employee and nonpersonnel costs—culled from multiple cross-industry datasets. It helps companies gauge where their major selling, general and administrative (SG&A) support functions stand in relation to peers.
OrgBuilder 4.4. A patented software platform, OrgBuilder by BCG X helps BCG experts diagnose, execute, and track the progress of organizational change.
SG&A Health Check. This survey helps our digital support functions consulting team identify the maturity of a client’s support functions—and zero in on focal points for improvement.
End-to-End Process Benchmarks. These benchmarks cover five major processes—including procure to pay and hire to rehire—to give companies a more holistic view of how they are carrying out business operations functions.
KEY Impact Management by BCG X. Via dashboards, analytics, and reporting, this web-based solution helps companies track the progress of hundreds of initiatives—and keep things moving forward.
Support functions are becoming more closely intertwined with corporate success. This requires companies to adopt a new mindset—one that goes “Beyond GBS.”
Rather than attempting once again to optimize the matrix, companies are looking for new organizational solutions.
With generative AI, global business services units such as HR and legal have a unique opportunity to outgrow the standard transactional focus and deliver real value to the organization.
Companies that make their support functions more business-centric can unlock a range of benefits, enhance value creation, and help power an enterprise-wide transformation.
