Gazprom-Media Holding has published the first results of the work carried out by the Shared Service Centre (SSC), which was created on the basis of GPM Partner. The project to create the Holding’s SSC was launched a year ago, on October 30, 2020.
As of October 2021, the operator of digital and satellite television NTV-PLUS and the sub-holding GPM Radio had already switched to get serviced at the SSC.
In addition to the basic plan to transfer the Holding’s existing assets, the SSC has set up back-office functions in a number of Gazprom-Media’s new projects and companies. A GPM Partner branch opened in St. Petersburg in June 2021 to service the assets located in Russia’s northern capital. There are currently about 900 employees working at GPM Partner to service more than 80 legal entities.
Gazprom-Media Holding’s Shared Service Centre centralises an unusually large number of functions for such a project. These include: personnel records and personnel management (recruitment, training, compensation and benefits, labour protection), financial services (accounting, treasury and transformation operations in accordance with IFRS, financial control), legal support, procurement, IT infrastructure and support for business applications, administrative tasks, corporate security, technical support of the broadcasting complex, signal distribution, etc. There are a total of more than 130 services in 12 functional areas.
Close contact with business, meaning the internal client, is the key factor in the successful implementation of this complex project. It is precisely with this goal in mind that a number of detailed documents were developed in the first half of 2021 to regulate service provision procedures and to receive feedback on the quality of the SSC’s activity. Accordingly, a customer satisfaction survey was carried out in June across all assets that have been serviced by the SSC since the beginning of 2021 about the quality of the services that GPM Partner provides. The average score remained at the level of the previous measurement, which was made before the SSC was created. As a rule, satisfaction indicators may decrease during the switch to the SSC model, especially considering the number of functions that are transferred. The SSC team is doing all it can to maintain the same level of service and to improve the efficiency of the business processes that were in place before the project was launched.
The SSC has already made significant progress in increasing economic efficiency in its first year of operations. Notably, it made it possible to achieve significant savings in real purchases from those planned in the budget thanks to the centralisation of the procurement function. It also reduced administrative and business expenses on back-office support across a number of assets.
Increasing process efficiency and the organisation of an easy-to-use, high-quality service depends, in part, on the systems that the employees work in. The Holding recently launched a program for the automation of back-office functions, which encompasses the replacement of many existing IT solutions with more modern counterparts. While this automation will affect all processes, the main objective is to build a convenient electronic document management system and a system that allows clear and easy communication with the Holding’s employees.