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Published December 12, 2022, 9:46 AM
by Lionell Macahilig
Boehringer Ingelheim Global Business Services is celebrating its fifth-year milestone in the Philippines this year. Starting with only 50 people in November 2017, GBS Center Manila now has 500 people, covering a wide range of services and geographical locations like Canada and the United States for BI.
“When we started off, we had a regional scope envisaged for the center serving the APAC region and a little bit of the U.S. We used to have only half of the space with 160 seats and through the years, we saw that there is so much potential in this in this country of expanding the center in terms of the geographies we could cover and the type of work we can locate here,” said Jose Zaide, Managing Director and Head of the GBS Center Manila.
GBS Center Manila is part of a global business services organization, GBS Center Network, which serves as a captive center that provides services to other legal entities of BI across the globe. The center offers finance, human resources, master data management, and IT services.
“What is special about our business services is we also deploy our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system landscape for all centers and the respective processes for all operational functions. The administrative tasks of enabling functions are based here in the center. I am proud that we cover more than a typical business process outsourcing (BPO) facility,” shared Andrea Jakob, Vice President and Head of GBS Center Network.
“When we started GBS in 2010, it was not to gain huge cost savings. It was more intended to look into the quality of data and the effectiveness of processing. It is important that we first deploy an SAP system or an HR system and the like and transfer those tasks to our centers globally. For us, quality is more important. We significantly invest in our IT infrastructure, and we run SAP S4/HANA as our ERP system,” Andreas Hilf, Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Division GBS added.
GBS Center Manila opened to initially serve BI’s U.S. entity finance service, which accounts more than 50% of the company’s net sales. It was already a huge milestone for the center because the U.S. is the most important country for the company. In September 2018, GBS Center Manila brought in HR services. A new system called SuccessFactors followed.
“We then went on to bring support services for the entire GBS organization, which we call enabling services. Those were partly not on the original road map that we designed. We exceeded our expectations. Over the last five years, we would always find services that we could add on beyond what was originally planned,” said Zaide.
Challenges and opportunities
Through the years, GBS Center Manila went through significant growth, but with that growth came a lot of hard work and challenges. Teams within the center must interact with teams from other countries to bring the activities into the center through deployments or transitions.
“We have been successful in transitioning all these activities. I consider the transitions themselves as challenges to overcome. These are complex tasks, and people must adjust. We could see that even on the global arena when we interact with different cultures from the U.S., Australia, or APAC countries, we could see that the workforce showed great agility and adaptability to conform with the schedules that we have,” Zaide continued.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, GBS Center Network, including its Manila arm, must adapt its transition approach. The center did the transitions on virtual platforms. “I am impressed on how quickly we were able to adapt this approach, and people showed commitment. As a European company, we are not afraid with topics like business continuity management because of a volcano or typhoons,” Jakob added.
A people-centric culture
At the beginning, GBS Center Manila had about 160 seats. With a new expanded office, it now has over 400 workstations despite the pandemic. Other organizations might be cutting back, but the center’s expansion gives a positive signal to the markets that the center is here to stay, according to Zaide.
Like other shared services entities, GBS Center Network has chosen the Philippines as a site of operations due to the quality of the Filipino workforce. “It is super important that we find people close to the processes and systems. Multilanguage workforce is also big here. English for us is important, but you can also find Mandarin-speaking candidates and people who speak French in our center. Since we serve the U.S. market, flexibility is also important for us. We have people working in a three-shift model,” said Jakob.
Due to the convincing performance of GBS Center Manila, other partners within BI have become interested and started seeking support from the center. It will provide tech services soon. “We will see in the shared services industry more complex services that will be added to our portfolio. Because there is more automation and we have good, qualified people, we should take advantage and add more complex services to the centers in order to support core functions and let the organization focus on its main business,” Jakob added.
“Our culture focuses on people because we believe that the good results we deliver, the good metrics we show, and the additional services we bring are possible only because we hired the right people. For us, that is a key milestone,” Zaide added.
Future expansion
Looking to the coming years, the executives from GBS Center Network and GBS Center Manila shared some of their plans that will shape the future of the organization.
“We will start in 2024 with another part of the U.S. market, which is one of our biggest strategic markets. Next market is Japan. We will integrate here our services for Japan. We will also include additional services in the area of HR, such as learning and training. We will support distribution of benefits, travel, and expenses. We will go by next year around 20% of the workforce,” said Jakob.
Supporting Jakob, Zaide said: “If you follow what the industry of BPO companies and shared services companies here in the Philippines is planning for the next years, I think they plan to grow by 1 million more jobs. That is about 7% or 8% growth on the average. We will do our part by growing to 20 percent. That will take us to 600 people here. I personally believe that there is growth beyond that because there are so many additional services that we can add to the portfolio. There are other countries that we still need to include in our geographic portfolio like Japan. We are already serving Mainland China, but we have additional services that we want to introduce there like HR services.”
Meanwhile, Hilf talked about consolidating BI’s processes through a common platform. “Building a little bit deep picture of 2025 and beyond, in the year 2028, our target is to staff our entire company. Let us assume it is a USD 25-billion company. In terms of size, Boehringer is a very big company within Germany and it is one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the world. By 2028, we will have our entire company on one common platform, which is predominantly SAP S4/HANA,” he said.
“If you compare us with other German companies, I think we have a state-of-the-art infrastructure and this is a significant investment of our shareholders. We have harmonized processes and services covering the important things of our company. All accounts payable, accounts receivable, and the entire order management will be handled by our organization. We need to be very mindful that by the year 2028, running the platform requires people here in the Philippines. We take it with a huge accountability to manage that platform in the right manner. This is the reason we are here in the Philippines because we have the people who know to run those services on that one common platform,” Hilf concluded.
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