Case Study : Transforming finance / GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK)
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Transforming finance
Case study — GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is one of the world’s biggest health care companies. Headquartered in the UK, it employs more than 99,000 employees in 95 countries across three industries: pharmaceuticals, vaccines and consumer health care.
During 2019, GSK manufactured and delivered around 2.3 billion packs of medicine, 701 million vaccine doses and 4.2 billion consumer healthcare products, as well as invested £4.6 billion in research and development. All of this activity resulted in a turnover of £33.7 billion.
The GSK finance function is global and includes a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner whose functions include invoicing, purchase to pay, order to cash and record to report. Finance teams globally use one type of enterprise resource planning software, giving them access to one common set of data across the business.
While this setup has been largely successful, the company identified some areas that could be improved. These improvements aimed to save money and add real value to the company. We spoke to Riccardo Calliano, Head of Finance Capabilities Development and Talent Pipeline, whose role focuses on developing and driving talent, capability and strategic workforce planning agendas across the global finance function.
Creating a common framework
Finance transformation at GSK began as a ‘best in class’ programme; aiming to optimise the service that finance provides for cost efficiency, quality and ease of access. The company set its sights on all finance activity across its global operations, from direct employees to those employed by BPO partners. All are considered to be part of the finance family.
GSK began their transformation programme from a strong position. Some important groundwork had been laid through the implementation of a single set of systems, applications and products across the whole business. Finance teams had also completed a simplification project focusing on processes, standardisation and reporting.
‘If you want to optimise the efficiency of your processes, the first thing you need to start from is standardisation. If you don’t have a common framework and data set, you’ll be creating suboptimal solutions around the complexities, which isn’t very efficient’.
Riccardo Calliano, Head of Finance Capabilities Development and Talent Pipeline
Building on best-in-class benchmarking
GSK Finance’s focus on research and development is reflected in its finance transformation. The project started with a comprehensive internal and external benchmarking project that explored structures, models and capabilities. From this, the management team began developing and seeking approval for a robust transformation proposal.
Focusing on future capabilities
Building capabilities is an important element of the transformation programme. GSK’s finance capability framework mapped and aligned new and existing roles across the organisation and assessed them from a present and future capability perspective. By creating ‘job families’ and competency levels across the internal finance function, the company wanted to create job paths based on technical, business and leadership competences.
GSK has structured its resources around capabilities. It does this by using the 70:20:10 model, in which individuals obtain 70% of their knowledge ‘on the job’ through experience and workplace support, 20% from social interactions with others and 10% from formal educational events and courses.
An internal finance career path portal has allowed staff to assess their skills and competency levels against their current and desired job type. This was combined with their manager’s assessment to form a new competency profile. This profile forms the basis of all development discussions around skills or competency gaps.
Employees can use the portal’s search function to explore all organisational job paths by job family, location or competency level. It gives them clear oversight and understanding about the skills, experience and competences they need to progress along their desire pathway. An example of this would be a financial analyst in the corporate team wanting to become a finance director in the commercial team. Using the finance director profile and their own competency profile, they will understand their position and development needs. This makes subsequent discussions with managers and resulting development plans more targeted.
As well as focusing on capabilities, the portal contains resources relating to personal development, including mentoring, coaching, interview techniques and how to facilitate a good development plan discussion.
‘Transforming finance is not just about changing job roles, ways of working and processes, it is about transforming a culture. In order to do that, every Finance employee needs to build the capabilities that will set them up for success in the future’.
Riccardo Calliano, Head of Finance Capabilities Development and Talent Pipeline
Segregated or shared service finance models are highly efficient in terms of processing power. But the approach can bring cultural challenges over time. A significant benefit of transformation at GSK has been the common recognition of a standard ‘one finance’ approach, taking the internal financial resources and their BPO colleagues on a common journey. This has resulted in fewer barriers between finance teams.
The future capabilities programme has also increased transparency and unlocked opportunities across finance. Employees understand how developing their skills can contribute to future roles in other departments, and where they may need to develop.
In addition, the capabilities initiative has raised awareness of how the technical and judgement skills gained in lower-level accounting roles can lead to commercial finance and business partnering roles in the future.
‘Our internal stakeholders, are our businesses: the general managers, the factory directors, R&D scientists and their teams. Those are the people we support. So, if we come up with something brilliant on paper that doesn’t serve their needs, it’s not going to work’.
Riccardo Calliano, Head of Finance Capabilities Development and Talent Pipeline
GSK’s guiding principles for transformation success
