10 Years - Journey of a Decade

An amazing journey of 10 years the FSS team has had in Kochi. This was part of the GSS team. On 01 Sept. 2008, the first project of GSS went live with a 5 member team supporting the UK HR Function. Gradually the team started providing services that touched the entire life cycle of customers. Bid support team works with the global sales and marketing team in getting new clients, ITG provides technological solutions, GSS-HR provided the Hire to Retire support like recruitment, On-boarding/off-boarding, Employee Data Management, MIS reports, Trainings, Benefits administration and Secretarial outsourcing. Strategic Sourcing helps procuring materials efficiently and finally FSS provided end to end Financial support across all regions. FSS started its operations in July 2009, and was a 9 member team supporting 4 divisions – the names of which changed periodically – basically being DS, GMS, PVP/LP and MS; later the four divisions were Creative production, Sourcing Solutions, Customer Com & Publishing and Digital and Document work flow in UK providing financial management and controllership support. FSS US team started operations with a modest headcount of 4 in 2010 supporting P2P, O2C, R2R and FP&A process. The commitment, sincerity, passion that people had here is immense and worth mentioning. The atmosphere was like a second family, people got along very well and atmosphere was lively. In 2009 Aneesh O I from OPI joined WL, and he referred me here. Did not have even my resume updated then. Probably this was destined. Back then we were like one family, Admin team lead by Vincent Shaji, only Neema and Rijo in HR.

Raghu Ram Interviewed me in Dec. 2009, Sharyn Coleman from UK in Jan 2010 and my official joining was in Feb 2010. Remember the discussion with Alex Sir on my last day at OPI saying how my father was sad, I was leaving the company so soon, but hope to complete 10 years at Williams Lea. Never anticipated at the end of 10 years situation would be this – An interesting journey indeed! Venkatesh was instrumental in setting up the GSS team for WL. Stuart Trood was the CFO then, and Kristien Elgey was the division head. With Raghu moving out – the division was split into two with Ranjith managing FSS-UK and Anil managing FSS-US both reporting into Head of Group Shared Services – Milton Fernando. One of the most valuable advise I had received was from Srinivas who said, put your head down and work, Beaware of what is happening around. Then there was restructuring of teams from Region wise to process centric – with FinOps team and FP&A team. Ram Nishanth took over FinOps and Sudeep was heading the FP&A team. Williams Lea acquired Tag and there was lot of learning, as this was being integrated with Sourcing. Some of the interesting facts of working here are – entrepreneurial spirit of the company and working closely with clients; hardwork along with having lot of fun, daily challenges/surprise; it never gets boring within this company. Started as a print company, they were the corporate solutions providers, providing services to various sectors like Financial services, retail, consumer, Life Science, Legal & Professional, Public Sector, Automatic, Energy and Chemical. Another valuable advise was from Tobias who said make your own career development a personal priority. No one else will do it for you. He had come from DHL group and moved back. Soon after Advent took over WLT from DHL. Here one learns to accept and adapt to change. There is some or the other change every other day. We had opportunity to visit places/countries as well. On Ram leaving could take up the challenge of leading the Finance Operations team.

Over the years, there has been so many changes in the people. When I joined, the thought was people are important. It’s important to take care of them to make an organization successful. Be it any process. Starting with Sharyn, a great learning from her was Have confidence in yourself. Have the courage to call a spade a spade. Be more confident and challenge if something’s wrong. Now am taking one day at a time, reminiscence the days gone by, looking forward to what is in stored. Now the focus is on process. It doesn't matter who is doing, let people come and go; we need to have a strong process in place, seems to be the attitude now. For me personally both are equally important and like two sides of the same coin. People have been just moving out, and before the end of my 10 years, there would be No FSS team at all here in Kochi as the process would have completely moved out to Accenture.