Talent at heart of Ireland’s role in global business services provision

A specialist group within the American Chamber of Commerce aims to capitalise on Ireland’s strength as a centre for global business services.

Set up 18 months ago, the Global Strategic Services (GSS) forum includes companies such as Indeed, Pfizer GFS, Ingersoll Rand, Hertz, Dell EMC, Pramerica, Microsoft and Oracle.

Formed to share experience and to consider how to better ‘market’ Ireland as a global centre of excellence for strategic business services, part of its work is focused on ensuring the sector has a strong talent pipeline.

It recently launched a Global Business Services qualification in conjunction with the Dublin Institute of Technology and The Hackett Institute, a worldwide specialist in continuing professional development.

It’s a timely move. According to new research by jobs search engine Indeed, Ireland has become a global centre for roles with cross-functional job titles such as operations associate (up 121 per cent), programme manager (up 118 per cent), risk manager (up 101 per cent), senior technical support (up 94 per cent) and data analyst (up 70 per cent).

In total, vacancies posted on the site classed as ‘Global Business Services roles’ are up 52.3 per cent since the start of 2017.

The new Global Business Services Career Pathway qualification – a world first – commences in September and will deliver the knowledge and skills required by an increasingly global business environment.

The global business services sector is “one of Ireland’s best kept secrets for the last 20 years,” says Padraic O’Neill, head of the GSS forum and managing director of Pfizer’s European Strategic Services Organisation.

Pfizer employs more than 96,000 people worldwide. Of the 3,500 it employs in Ireland, 500 are in strategic services.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be part of one of the fastest growing and evolving sectors, an area that employs over 45,000 and offers potential for highly qualified and skilled, sophisticated global roles that will provide sustainable growth for many years to come,” he says.

Biggest challenges

One of the biggest challenges facing the industry is ensuring Ireland is the location of choice against other very competitive locations. “To do this, we have to exploit our greatest resource – our talent pool,” O’Neill says. Boosting the sector’s profile in the labour market is central to this.

“The Pfizer story mirrors what most of the mature sites in Ireland have experienced over the last 10 to 15 years. When we were originally set up, the major areas were ‘invoice to pay’, ‘order to cash’ and ‘general ledger’. We moved all activity in these areas from countries to the left of a line from Sweden to Italy and generated significant savings through a lower cost base here in Ireland. Once centralised, we then started to standardise the processes and then optimise – creating further savings for the corporation as a whole.”

However, once centralised, a lot of the activity was ripe for moving again – to cheaper locations. Initially, Pfizer outsourced a lot of this activity to Genpact in India and over the past 10 years opened lower-cost locations in China, Prague and Costa Rica.

“As a site, we reacted to this very positively, embracing the change and recognising that if we couldn’t compete on price then we shouldn’t resist. Instead, we were looking at other opportunities – moving knowledge-based activity in, at the same time as transactional activity migrated out. We also very quickly established ourselves as the European centre of transformation – so whenever Pfizer acquired, divested, rolled out new ERP systems, Dublin was front and centre, providing leadership for all significant projects,” O’Neill says.

As a result, the company now has a facility of almost 500 accounting and tax professionals, from 36 different countries, based in Ringsend, Dublin 4.

“We are the global centre for operational transfer pricing, VAT, statutory accounting and audit and treasury operations. We’re also the regional centre for corporate accounting and strategic collections and credit risk. As a site, we probably have a bigger transfer pricing and VAT department than most of the Big Four in Dublin, we have more accountants and tax professionals than most of the Big 10 accounting firms in the country, and more accountants than any other finance location in Pfizer – a far cry from when we were first set up 15 years ago.”

It sometimes felt, however, as if all this value-adding activity at Pfizer had been done in isolation,” O’Neill says, “with no reference to what others have been doing in the industry.” Ireland was “missing a trick” as a result.

The GSS provides the forum for sharing experiences and learning within the sector. It also allows the sector come together to boost its profile, similar “to other industries that Ireland has become recognised for and synonymous with, like bio pharma”, he says.

Collaboration enables the GSS understand common challenges facing the industry, benchmark against other established and emerging locations, and enhance Ireland’s reputation as the preferred location of choice.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time to be involved in global business services in Ireland today, with wonderful opportunities and challenges,” says O’Neill.

“We are uniquely placed to harness the technology revolution and build on 20 years of experience, success and evolution but it will require all of us coming together as an industry – members, educational and professional organisations and Government, a greater ‘Ireland Alignment’ to ensure not only that we survive but that we continue to thrive,” he says.

Benefits

One of the benefits that the new education programme will bring participants is a greater ability to take a holistic overview of global shared services.

“Historically, we all operated in our own silos, with finance reporting to finance, data to data, logistics to logistics, and so on,” says Janet Walsh, global director trade compliance, Ingersoll Rand Legal Department, based in Swords, Co Dublin.

“One of the things we identified in the GSS, as we talked about how can we compete for value add, is that we are not operating on a cross-functional basis in our organisations. To be sustainable we need employees who are global thinkers, who can see end-to-end within the organisation, and where whole value-add lies.”

It’s about future-proofing Ireland Inc in terms of the growth of shared services. “What do we need in terms of employees, of skills, competencies, tech skills and future needs? We need people who think not just in their own silo, but can see right across the value chain.”

To get such talent, the sector needs to position itself on the same footing as other professions. “In the GSS we could see that kids were coming out of school able to say ‘I want to be an accountant’ or ‘I want to be in HR’, and know that there is a career pathway there. We wanted to create a qualification for a shared services leader, to actually create it as a career path in Ireland,” Walsh says.

The result is a highly valuable, accredited programme of education that will help practitioners within the global business services sector to think globally, strategically and cross functionally.

Given the current geopolitical framework – from trade wars to Brexit – these abilities are more important than ever, Walsh says. “Ireland is the only English-speaking country in the eurozone, post-Brexit. We’ve a good advantage to seize the day.”