CIMA where business + finance meet
60% cost savings switching EMEA into shared services centre The technical skills are vital but equip you to do about 20% of the job. The rest of the job is about communicating, interpersonal skills, project management – the emotional intelligence side – which CIMA is very good at.
Boon Somchit, Vice President Global Accounting, AMD, Kuala Lumpa Back in 2001 AMD made the strategic decision to switch from literally hundreds of different systems to a single platform. ‘Everyone in the Kuala Lumpa (Asia) finance department was given the choice of going down the business partnering or shared service route’ explains Boon Somchit. ‘My management accounting training enables me to look at a single potentially huge problem, and see not one problem but lots of different solutions; basically every problem can be broken down into different components and a different process can then be designed to manage each component.’ She found herself, together with her team, setting out the vision, strategy, structure, processes and performance metrics for AMD’s first ever shared service centre. Nine years on they are very proud to have evolved beyond Asia to become AMD Global Shared Services Centre now going way beyond accounting and finance to include IT, HR, procurement, credit, customer services and many more service functions. ‘We moved from hundreds of systems in each country and within each company to a single global platform from SAP which made everything possible’. They have been able to switch jobs from high cost to low cost locations. And in the process they have also standardised jobs, quality, time and procedures.
‘All-in-all we have been able to very significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency. For example when we switch the EMEA functions into the service centre we reduced costs by some 60%.’ They manage everything on a series of dashboards where every day they monitor their performance against objectives and competitor benchmarks. ‘We can look at invoices for example and see why they are not being processed. Were they entered incorrectly? Were they missing the necessary project codes? Was the bank slow in fulfilling?’ ‘The great thing about CIMA is that the qualification recognises that the technical skills are vital but probably equip you to do about 20% of the job. The rest of the job is about communicating, interpersonal skills, project management – the emotional intelligence side – which CIMA is very good at.’ ‘We have developed a “love what you do/hate what you do” chart which helps us constantly re-evaluate our processes. Critically it also helps us retain employees, keep them motivated and moving forward. Developing and nurturing our human capital, our people, has been really important to our success.’
CIMA value: AMD 60% cost savings switching EMEA into shared services centre T. +44 (0)20 8849 2251 E. cima.contact@cimaglobal.com
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