Shared service centers are built to cut costs. That’s the mandate they’re given, the metric they’re measured on, and the conversation they have with leadership every budget cycle.
So when automation arrives and capacity is freed up, the natural response is to do what has always been rewarded: reduce headcount, report the savings, move on.
Adam Mroczkowski has spent over a decade as a P2P Global Process Owner, most recently at Rockwell Automation. His view on that response is clear:
The service centers or GBS have only one asset, which is people. So why would you cut on people, which is your profit generator?
The people who spent years inside the process, managing exceptions, handling supplier relationships, knowing instinctively which invoices will cause problems before they arrive, carry institutional knowledge that no system replicates. When that gets cut or scattered, it disappears. Rebuilding it costs considerably more than keeping it.
Thinking differently about your people is genuinely difficult within the current structure. The measurement system rewards efficiency, not reinvestment. The mandate to expand into new territory has to be earned before it’s given. And proposing to move people into work the business has never associated with shared services is a harder conversation than the one about headcount reduction.
The centers making real progress have found a way through that. They build the mandate rather than waiting for it, through work visible enough that the business starts to see the team differently.
In our latest P2Podcast episode, Adam talks through what that looks like from the inside.
In the episode, Adam gets specific on:
- What it actually takes to build a high-value GBS from the inside
- How to earn mandate when nobody is handing it out
- What it looks like to move your people into higher-value work
- Where the real opportunities are that most SSC centers haven’t claimed yet
- What the most ambitious centers are doing today that nobody would have called shared services five years ago
Listen on Spotify
Watch on YouTube
About Adam Mroczkowski
Adam has spent more than a decade working in global process ownership and Procure-to-Pay, across different industries and large, complex organizations. He’s currently working as a Global Process Owner, and much of his work revolves around one simple but difficult question: how do you actually make processes work better across an entire enterprise? Over the years, he’s been involved in automation initiatives, operating model decisions, and the ongoing debate between shared services, centers of excellence, and outsourcing.
Adam Mroczkowski, Global Process Owner, Rockwell Automation
