Success Story
Co-creating Operational Excellence through Compelling Transition Strategies
Client: Leading South African Telecommunications Service Provider
A leading telecommunications provider in South Africa wanted to streamline, consolidate and transform its business processes spread across more than 40 office locations managed by 260+ resources into four strategic hubs. With an emphasis on cost optimization, accuracy enhancement, and best-in-class operations to be delivered in a rapid and efficient manner, the client decided to partner with WNS. The already existing synergies between the client and WNS were leveraged to provide an accelerated and risk-free transition approach for its key business functions including, procurement, human resources, finance & accounting and fixed asset management.
WNS, in collaboration with the client, co-created a risk-free transition solution based on the following parameters:
- Hub model implementation to centralize core business processes into four strategic hubs
- Setup of South Africa’s first onshore finance and accounting shared service center
- Organizational change management to retain critical business resources and knowledge
- Reporting & Analytics tool implementation for performance visibility and tracking, along with strategic insights
WNS began a seven-month-long, three-phased, risk-free transition for the telecom service provider. Each phase of the transition ensured continuity of business processes and guaranteed incremental improvements at every step. Managing the complexity involved in the transition required a structured ‘EnABLE’ methodology for watertight governance.
This transition project deployed a global resource pool to manage varied complexity at each phase. Operations were consolidated across key service locations with a robust central reporting mechanism to eliminate redundancies. Automated workflows increased the company’s business agility and armed it with category and supply-related insights to make accurate, data-led business decisions. An enterprise-wide organizational change management program was executed as an integral part of the transition strategy.
As part of its digital offering suite, WNS delivered a reporting and analytics tool which collated information from disparate data sources and performed in-depth operational analyses for enhance decision support. This ensured superior business outcomes in key areas of procurement, human resources, finance and accounting.
What we achieved
- Built South Africa’s first ever finance & accounting shared service center in record 12 weeks to bring in best practices of finance & accounting processes and systems
- Avoided business disruption by achieving service level agreements and excelling on all key performance indicators from day one of operations
- Implemented analytics as a value-added service offering to provide actionable business insights and visibility to processes;
- The well laid-out organizational change management strategy along with the meticulous transition execution helped retain 30 critical in-house resources, ensuring knowledge retention and process control
- The consolidation and standardization of operational processes into four hubs resulted in 19 percent cost savings in the first year, and a further 12 percent spread across the rest of the five-year contract term attributed to higher productivity gains through transformation initiatives.
Overall, the project is on track to achieve efficiency gains of 30 percent through the contract period.