Optimizing Governance in Shared Services: A Discussion with Dow Chemical's Theresa Jones
Add bookmarkTheresa Jones likes efficiency. And accountability.
As Global Director of the Business Process Service Centers at The Dow Chemical Company, Jones has achieved both by developing well-defined work process activities common across all businesses to provide improved flexibility, agility and low-cost resourcing for Dow businesses and joint ventures.
"My leadership team is made up of Global Operations Leaders who are accountable for the service for each of the functional areas. For example, in the procure-to-pay space, I have one leader accountable to ensure that service is reliable and meets client expectations across all six centers."
"The other role I have in my organization are Center Leaders, who are accountable for ensuring the operational reliability within each of their centers."
"Another part of governance is listening to clients and ensuring that we’re meeting their service expectations. We do that in different ways, including client satisfaction surveys and engaging the client at the executive level and the layer below to ensure we understand the KPIs and how we’re performing relative to service level agreements."
Even with such well-defined roles and processes, Jones notes that optimizing the governance function has been key to improving performance and analytics.
"There are about five entities involved in the end-to-end process and it takes each of them doing their part effectively to ensure a positive outcome, pay on time," noted Jones. "We’ve instituted a governance committee to look across the end-to-end process and establish metrics that can monitor the success of each step in that process."
Theresa Jones likes efficiency. And accountability.
As Global Director of the Business Process Service Centers at The Dow Chemical Company, Jones has achieved both by developing well-defined work process activities common across all businesses to provide improved flexibility, agility and low-cost resourcing for Dow businesses and joint ventures.
