Shared Services Magic Combination: Innovative Leadership + Healthy Ecosystem

What's Missing in Malaysia's SSCs? 

Given three years of RPA use cases being shared across forums like SSON and SSO Analytics, there is now much improved awareness of intelligent automation's value as an enterprise "competency" as opposed to a discrete tool to fix select problems. In a recent survey of Malaysian shared services, nearly 8 out of 10 shared services leaders aligned IA as a value-driving competency for the enterprise. This bodes well for the increasing demand for digitization strategies that define the modern enterprise.

The market is still at an early stage however, with few practitioners believing that what we are seeing right now is a significant shift towards "lights out" processing. Indeed, most practitioners confirm RPA’s impact on shared services activity as "moderate", predominantly in the form of changing the type of work that is done (and who does it).

Although RPA is in a growth phase, most enterprises that have recognized its inherent value, also recognize the hurdles facing further scaling or expansion of robotic process automation. 

Data presents one of the biggest problems, with nearly 2/3 of Malaysian respondents confirming that “data readiness” is an obstacle, and they are not yet actively addressing requirements. Similarly, while RPA delivers cost, quality and cycle time benefits, what we are rapidly seeing is that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Improved evaluation of process suitability through process discovery, real-time tracking of process deviation through process mining, and the integration of cognitive technology to turn non-structured data into structured data will have an explosive impact on value. 

Right now, however, nearly 4 out of 10 organizations say the incomplete ecosystem is impeding their ability to scale; and change management skills & resources are the biggest impediments to RPA optimization.

Other issues highlighted in the report include the gap in “innovative” talent and leadership. This is a major concern for regional SSCs.

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Note: Find out more about the adoption of IA as well as Talent trends across the Malaysian Shared Services landscape: Read SSON Analytics’ Malaysia Shared Services 2019 Workbook.