The use of finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO) continues to rise throughout the world. The FAO market, as measured by the number of contracts signed for large FAO agreements (those that include five or more processes and/or have a contract value of at least $50 million) has increased steadily since 2000, and by more than 45 percent since 2005 (Fersht). A March 2007 IDC (Interactive Data Corporation) report forecasts that the global FAO market will exceed $47.6 billion in 2008. Although the United States will remain the largest segment of the FAO market, the fastest growing region includes Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) (Bingham).
In the past 18 months, several large outsourcing agreements covering multiple finance and accounting processes were finalized. Earlier this year, the world’s top personal paper products manufacturer, Texas-based Kimberly-Clark Corporation, entered into a five-year contract with FAO provider Genpact. Genpact will operate Kimberly-Clark’s global accounts payable, travel and entertainment expense management, pricing administration, accounting-to-reporting, and supply-chain accounting processes. Late last year, Aktiebolaget SKF hired outsourcing provider Capgemini to manage multiple finance and accounting processes for several of the Swedish ball bearings maker’s European operations. A few months earlier, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) signed a 10-year, $160 million deal with outsourcing provider Xansa, which will manage much of the BBC’s purchasing and sales transaction processing, financial management and project accounting, payroll processing, and other finance and accounting processes. The BBC reported that the arrangement will help it save more than $375 million over the course of the relationship (FAO Today News).
The use of modern multi-process FAO began with a 1990 meeting in a London hotel between a BP CFO and a partner at the consulting firm now known as Accenture. The two men discussed the severe challenges the oil company confronted: plummeting oil prices, new, highly agile competition, and a burdensome cost structure. The discussion produced an innovative idea: rather than simply providing advice on how to make the CFO’s function more efficient, Accenture would take over the CFO’s entire accounting function, with the exception of control and financial policy. The following year, more than 300 BP employees from numerous locations transferred to Accenture’s outsourcing center in Aberdeen, Scotland. There they performed forecasting, payment processing, joint venture accounting, and other processes that Accenture designed and managed.
BP reduced the costs of the outsourced processes by an estimated 50% over the term of the agreement, which has been renewed several times and continues today, a time when the oil giant spends an estimated $1 billion annually in outsourced services of all types with various vendors. Between BP’s pioneering FAO venture in 1991 and 2002, the worldwide growth of multi-process FAO progressed at a slow pace. During that period, the vast majority of companies pursuing FAO focused on single-process arrangements. Since 2003, however, the use of multi-process FAO has surged, growing by roughly 30 percent (from year to year) during each of the past four years, according to The Everest Group and Deloitte Consulting.
Despite the growth of all forms of outsourcing relationships – those involving finance and accounting and, even more so, those involvinghuman resources (HR) and information technology (IT) processes – dissatisfaction has remained surprisingly high among buyers, according to numerous surveys of business executives involved in outsourcing relationships. Fifty-four percent of a group of 228 global CFOs (two-thirds of these CFOs work for companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue) indicated that outsourcing does not deliver the benefits promised by the media and outsourcing vendors. However, 73 percent of those same respondents asserted that they would be interested in outsourcing from a few processes up to every process “that’s not core,” (CFO Research Services, 2006).
Together, those seemingly contradictory attitudes – a strong willingness to outsource and skepticism about outsourcing’s benefits – suggest that:
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Outsourcing promises valuable opportunities but poses formidable challenges and risks; and
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A significant number of outsourcing agreements have been mismanaged; and
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The outsourcing market is still relatively immature.
The outsourcing market is however maturing, thanks to the discipline’s growth, the growing experience of outsourcing buyers, and the current effort to develop professional standards similar to those that apply to accountants and lawyers (The Wall Street Journal).These standards, if and when finalized, may facilitate more effective and valuable outsourcing relationships. To date, research on the effectiveness and perception of the value of outsourcing relationships strongly suggests that mismanagement of the outsourcing relationship by both providers and users of the services represents a primary source of dissatisfaction. This mismanagement can occur from the initial decision to outsource all the way to the end of the relationship.
For example, when 120 finance and accounting executives whose North American companies had entered into large FAO agreements were asked to identify the most challenging aspects of FAO, the third most frequently cited response (among 14) was “not sure/don’t know” (EquaTerra, 2005). Finance and accounting professionals familiar with the old saw “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” would agree that a company also cannot manage what it does not understand. A more recent and highly detailed 30-page study on the evolution of outsourcing concludes that three specific areas of the discipline are in greatest need of improvement:
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monitoring and managing the benefits;
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selecting the outsourcing provider;and
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involving the “right people” and culturally aligning the outsourcing buyer and provider (KPMG, 2007).
Improving each of those areas, as well as effectively managing the overall outsourcing relationship from inception through conclusion, can be achieved by understanding and addressing the challenges and risks that cause mismanagement. The purpose of this guideline is to provide a framework for guidance on managing FAO’s opportunities, challenges and risks, that is, what might be done at each stage of the FAO lifecycle to enhance the probability of a successful FAO initiative.
This guidance qualifies as “good practices”, because “best practices” have not yet emerged as modern FAO continues to mature. In fact, given the unique circumstances of each organization, a clear set of “best practices” may never emerge. These good practices can support the development of solutions or responses to such unique circumstances.
The target audience of this guideline is buyers of FAO services and those charged with implementing and managing FAO relationships. This guideline can be applied to the outsourcing of a single finance and accounting process as well as to multi-process outsourcing.
Although certain forms of FAO have existed for many years, this MAG deals with modern FAO, which typically involves multiple finance and accounting processes and longer term relationships (in the range of five-year to ten-year contractual commitments).These FAO relationships share many characteristics with the large information technology outsourcing (ITO) and human resources outsourcing (HRO) agreements that have grown increasingly common during the past 10 to 20 years.
To date, the worldwide use and volume of FAO trails behind ITO and HRO. Much of the guidance in this MAG is both based on and can be applied to ITO and HRO relationships. As a North American finance executive at a global software company told a business publication last year, “Finance executives can walk over to the IT function and ask, ‘How did this work for you?’”
FAO covers a wide collection of processes, ranging from highly transactional activities such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and payroll, to processes that require greater and more complex degrees of knowledge and analysis (e.g., treasury, tax strategy, or financial planning and analysis). Although the same processes can help manage the challenges, risks and opportunities of both sorts of finance and accounting activities, the risks associated with knowledge- and analysis-based FAO are greater, and therefore require greater management discipline.
How well an outsourcing arrangement is managed matters more than where the outsourcing services are provided. That point has at times been obfuscated by politically charged discussions and articles that examine the pros and (more frequently) the cons of off-shoring. “Off-shoring” can be performed by an external outsourcing vendor or within a company that establishes “captive” shared-services operations in other countries. The geographic location of an FAO provider does matter, and its potential implications should be addressed during the selection of a provider; however, the location of the outsourcing services matters less than how well the FAO buyer manages and monitors the relationship. This guideline focuses squarely on the latter challenge.
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