OUTSOURCING THE FINANCE FUNCTION
Tanya Mittal
State University Of New York At Buffalo
What happens when a world-class company like that of Microsoft figures out that one of its major functions is not that “world-class”? The answer is simple. They try to fix it! The question is how?
Microsoft Corporation is an American International Technology Company with revenue of US$ 93.50 billion headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates in the year 1975, it now stands as one of the best technology and software company. When Microsoft discovered that they were loosing out on their finance, accounting and procurement functions, they wanted to standardize the processes in order to improve the …show more content…
A project that they called, The OneFinance Initiative. It comprised of a 5 step process with the first being the most important and the most risky – the process of outsourcing. The reason why Microsoft came to a decision of outsourcing its finance function to an outside body was that they felt they were concentrating more on the basic repetitive tasks in house. This process was adding no value to the company and Microsoft did not have enough time to concentrate on their business insights and partners. This is what the Microsoft International CFO, Claud Changarnier had to say about it …show more content…
They knew that to make the project successful, they needed to clearly define and measure the performance with the desired goals and objectives. The Microsoft contract created a “layered” approach to measuring the business. They used operating metrics, SLAs and KPIs that were ted to the monetary performance of Accenture. Both the companies mutually worked on the details of how they would measure the performance and success of OneFinance.
“Accenture has a responsibility to deliver on its contractual obligations in terms of SLAs, but we also put emphasis on making sure we drive the right end-to-end results. Microsoft cares more about Accenture resolving its service requests and issues than say, responding to an email in a given time period, so we are constantly re-examining our SLA,” says Cheung OneFinance managing director, Accenture.
Beyond the SLAs, they were other metrics that were established to make the project successful. For example, the customer satisfaction was measured by seeing the annual financial controller and taking a procurement community