 Hey, welcome everyone to agile in the finance and accounting KPO world by Ken and Sayali. We are glad that both Ken and Sayali can join us today. Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the part of the world, a very warm welcome from both of us me and Ken. So let me introduce myself. I'm Sayali. Sayali today from India. I have an agile coach with Metro Global Solutions on a professional front and an art lover on a personal front along with being mother to two teenagers, husband and in-laws. And Ken. Yes, my name is Ken, Ken Viras, here sitting in Germany, Dusseldorf. And yeah, my title is head of transformation innovation. So I'm doing partly agility, new way of working, also doing a lot of key account management and project management here in from Germany up and leading the team in Pune. Yeah, on the private side, I also love doing paragliding. So next week, if everything goes well, I can do another paragliding session in France, hopefully, hopefully the weather plays along. Super. All right, thanks Ken. So today we will share our experience of our transformation journey in the finance and accounting space in the KPO world. Oh, let's begin. So do you know which metro we are on the screen, you will see three metros, metro shoes, metro wholesale and metro parade. So let us check via Mentimeter. Please click on menti.com and use the code. You can add it in the chat link also directly, you can use that one. Otherwise, if not, yeah, like society said menti.com. And then there is a code. In case the link doesn't work, but ideally, otherwise you can write also in the chat. In the chat box. I'll stop sharing my screen so that you can share. Let's see. Yeah, metro shoes we have one. And then we have metro cash and carry. No one selected metro the train. So far. If you want also in the chat you can. You can add it in case the link doesn't work. Have one in green check. Yeah, I see it also. If you want to tell you can reshare, I can just say the numbers. Say it again. You can reshare the PowerPoint slides again. Yes. So basically B is the correct answer. All right. Yes, yes. Okay. So we are this, we are this metro metro cash and carry. To the whole sale business. With the restaurant owners. So this is what we are. So I hope you remember us as this met. All right. So who are we. We are metro business solution center part of it. And we are born out we call ourselves that we are born out of a global giant. We call ourselves a global startup with a, you know, very traditional customer. So the entire process started into 2011. Where we wanted to kind of disrupt Lee innovate the finance technology. So transform a manual scattering, you know, accounting organization into a holistic, robust organization. That people process and technology at the center. So we have reinvented ourselves. And that's how we are now called business solution center. We believe in more in learning organization being a learning organization. So that's how our transformation journey is all about. We have a presence in Germany and India in India we have two offices in Pune and in Bangalore. So the motto is that, you know, we have a global vision to be a fluid global team. We save that way. And our customers spread across the world. So handing over to Kent for some more pieces of information. Yes. Yes. Basically, most of you came here because of, can you share the screen. We're talking about the knowledge at the KPO right so knowledge processing operations. And, yeah, and that's why we also wanted to show can you share the screens early. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. If you go to the next slide. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yes. So we said like why KPO I was also Siley when she brought it the first time. I was like, Oh, are we in the KPO because for us it was just okay. We have a project and we were looking at this. And yes, we are looking at the finance and accounting area. And, and then you could say, Hmm, this area isn't it. If you will look at the next slide, isn't it very clear that it's a very, you know, from our Stacy matrix, which we love and agility, isn't it in the simple area down there. So why even bother to think we should do agility in this area. But if you can see also, if you look at from the KPNG pictures, which is coming up next is that right, everyone is being affected by digitalization. And surely also the finance area is also getting affected. Since also a lot of RPA automation is coming in, which we also then attended to do. And there's a lot of regulation coming where now it's not paper anymore. It has to be digital. They have to show and so on and so on. This is making it more and more. It's not in that simple area anymore. And now it's starting to move. Right. And we put some little animation in there. So it started there. It was simple. Then it went to complicated. And then we realize now with adding more and more digitalization and also the automation. It became actually more and more complex. And then we said, for this, we need some transformation in the finance area. And we had a lot of first thing. We talked with the CFOs in the countries. Also here in the board member in Düsseldorf. And we said, like, we definitely need to change something because how we do it until now it doesn't fit anymore. And then all of these elements basically ingredients came together. Realizing, yes, we, we need to renew how we interact with our customer. And here we're talking internal customers. So as a country, we're serving them. So here we have to see how we can do it differently. We look at also on how to do the reduction in the process and the plans. And then surely now, since it's not only the country and Pune, but we also have the digital department, which just needs to be involved. We said, we cannot just have one times meetings, but we need to create a cross functional and a self organized team. And then because we don't know what's happening like always, we need to embrace creativity. We have to see what else can we do the layer of management we wanted to reduce. And also then we said, we definitely need to collaborate more. And then all of this we said, doesn't it sound very typical that this is an agile transformation? Why don't we do it? And then we looked at the agile values. I don't have to tell anyone here your folks that what is it? So we were deep dive later. But we looked at the values we looked at the principles and then we were thinking like, okay, which part of it should we do. While doing this thinking, we realized, first of all, if we think of our customer, like with whom we are working in this KPO. So with the finance and accounting, we realized first thing first, like, if we look at actually where agility is normally being done in the IT industry, it's more like a food truck. Why am I comparing this because our customers is also normally hotel restaurants catering. So they buy a lot in the wholesale. So that's why we took this picture as a metaphor to say, in the software industry or in IT, we are used to changes, right? There is an update coming tomorrow, something else changes. So we are used to like this food truck. Now I'm standing here. There's this customer and now I'm the next day and moving somewhere else. It's a different customer. So it's quite comfortable with having changes. Maybe today it's in this city. In one week it's a different city. Maybe they buy in Metro store, but the Metro store is different in sometimes in different cities. So they're used to this, you know, feeling of uncomfortable. But if you look at now in the finance and accounting, we took the metaphor saying like it's more like a restaurant. People are set, you know, the process is quite set. The menu is set. Yes, maybe there are some special cards, but it's like the basis is set. So they don't like so much changes. We even had one stories here. We had a project since they've been doing a process in 20 years. And then we said like, ah, so what should I do here with the finance process? And I'm like, yeah, just print it out, put the sign on it, put the number on it and then send it back to us. And when they got it, they print it out again, write something in it in the scan again. And then, you know, and we were like, oh my God, okay, looks like if we go to the digitalization area, there's need to be some changes. And that's why we said it's crucial that we really pick them up where they are and slowly bring them to this different way of working, which is agility. And then we said, okay, we really should emphasize on the upcoming ingredients. But we said, definitely we need to focus first on the individual interaction over the process and tools. And we also said like, we definitely need to discuss on my collaboration because before it was, you know, everyone was just there. The people in Pune, they were just doing stuff and doing it for France. And it was just being done that way and somehow it works. But they were not really talking. It was more like a contract. You have some SLAs and it was not really working together. And that's where we said, let's take the principles. We should work together. We should also invite everyone. So we also invited the CFO and all the head offs and so on, so on, or finance at the beginning to maintain that constant pace. And then we also said we need a team which works together closely because this change is not going to just happen. We need them to work very close. And then we have different teams who will also show later how it went. And this face to face conversations and also that we have the classical where we bring teams together and they can reflect and do retros. And definitely we need them to build trust because like I mentioned before, the simple invoicing which they had to, you know, print it, write something, scan it again, changing something in between. They don't like it too much. So we also like trust in this because automation was something new. All of them were like, yeah, we know it's coming, but we don't like it. So we also said, let's emphasize that we all together work on this. And it's not blaming each other and so on. And then we said, this is super crucial. We should do it. Yeah, and handing over now to Sally will share more about what we exactly mean with this in every step of our journey. Yes. Thank you so much again. All right. So for us as Ken mentioned, it was super critical that we analyze things, the current situation. So what we did we tried to analyze the current model working model that we were working with. And we realize why didn't it work for us. We had to give a thought to it. So there were meetings happening. There were hurdles happening. However, something was missing and which was collaboration that we realized. So the focus was more on, you know, who did what rather who didn't do it right. Was more of a focus. So it was a more of a blame game. So we thought that this need a change. This was more very, very technical meetings that were happening. And just imagine, you know, the entire team is spread across all, you know, three different countries. So if there was a absolute disconnect in everything. Of course, the byproducts were high attrition, no learning teams were not happy. This was the byproduct of all this. So we thought that, you know, we should we should do something. And this inspired us that Albert Einstein said that learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. And important thing is stop and ask questions. So, you know, we took a pause here, and we retrospect ourselves and solve. Can we do something better so that we can improve. That's how it instigated us to think more. And yes, we found our ways to handle the situation. We worked upon it, our working model and we thought that we should keep people at the center of the model, and then work upon. So we took the collaboration principle of us very seriously. We designed this kind of working model where, you know, there is a circular collaborative circles, where teams are working holistically with each other. So there is no me, me, me, my work, my team. It is not that it is our. So we move from me to we, and the circles had different roles were designed, designated to them. And with this we thought that people will start taking the ownership of their own own work, they'll start feeling it and then taking the ownership. So most importantly, we wanted them to enjoy the work they are doing, not just that nine to five typical job that they come they do and they go. So there has to be some involvement. And this is where we thought that this model of us, the circular model will work for us. And also, we thought that the hierarchy has to blur. You know, there is in the leadership we see we observe there is a control that every, every leaders, every leader want to feel it. So we thought that is also one of the factor that pulls the entire system down. And because of maybe you know there is no trust both the ways. So, this model did work for us. And the byproduct of course was the reduced attrition, I would say, and this overall the team started looking happier and the organizational organization became more productive I would say. So, we took agile values and principle really, really, really seriously when we started. So how do we do it but you know, we took it seriously how did we implement this, we know our pain areas now, and we need to overcome it. So, what we did is, we got approximately 30 people from three different countries in Pune. We put them together, and we organized a co-working week for everyone, you know, abiding the face to face collaboration or face to face communication we thought this will work. And it's not about only a gathering or doing all those come training sessions and team building it's it's not that we were focusing on the you know, human part of everything. Processes, you need not tell the KPO industry because this is very methodical industry they have six Sigma, you know all Sigma projects run here. So, that's not an issue here. The issue is the human connect that disconnect had to be, you know, sealed upon. So what we did is we got them together in Pune. Of course we talked about work. Definitely, you can, we sense that when everybody on the first day came in the meeting room, there was sudden silence, and still people were sitting in their own country groups, you know, they were still not gelling out. So, we thought, this is not working. So we took everybody out of the room, we went for dinners and lunches and heritage walks, and gardens and where not so that people mingle upon mingle with each other we travel you can see the photograph we travel in auto rickshaws as well. So, one of the incident I would like to share is Ken was a key person to do this is, we had been to Agakhan Palace in Pune, where Mahatma Gandhi Ji was present here for his fight for the independence of India. So, Ken asked everybody a question that this is the value for which, you know, Gandhi Ji was present. So, what is that for which value you will be present for. So, we never think that we will be present right, so this was very thought provoking for everyone that, okay, so the value started coming out, people started opening up, there was a big silence for some time. However, you know, the next day we could see a chair in the room, people started had started already mingling with each other. So, at times classroom or typical, you know, official work environment does not work. The human touch is really, really important for each one of us. And we as a human we love to be empathetic, and to be cared also. So, you know, even further, when we started. And people went to the countries and we started working the model had such a thing that you check in asking, how was your weekend, how was your mood, or how is your mood with which you are checking in. So then people started feeling that connect that I am important, I am also there. So people are cared about me they are empathetic about me, and this culture made a big difference. The challenge that we addressed is people, more on people. And this is how this a co-working week made a big difference in our working model. Yeah, to add to it. So basically in that, we even that moment when we were in that, where my Gandhi was prison, even some of the colleagues were, you know, having some tears because they were thinking of that deep, deep topic which they would go to jail to. And then we were also witnessing that other were sharing this. So this was like really the team building where we, you know, when we have that base which is very, we know each other and not knowing just, okay, what's your name and what do you like to eat, but to go to the deeper layers, it really had in the further discussions, because then if there's some difficult situation, it's not just, you know, you know, because you know deeper, it's not just like a colleague anymore, it's almost like a friend that you know, like, ah, that was important for that person. That's why they're actually sometimes fighting more in discussions because for them, this and this was important. So this was really the moments where we realized, yeah, taking that series to have a face to face, and really spend time. Many times they were saying like, ah, doing this stupid icebreakers asking these questions, you know, like what did you do weekend or we every time we thought of something different. They thought like it's a waste of time at the beginning but then when they realized actually this is, you know, people come they always when they when they come to that meeting they're like, ah, okay, first arrive. And then now let's talk about work, but first the private stuff, but we also made sure that not every meeting now we, you know, overdid it and it's all the time doing icebreakers and having these questions. But from time to time and also from depends on the like, also with the head offs we had this where we really spend and then we can go to that levels discussing about deeper topics. So what is actually not working here. So that question is not just like, yeah, I'm blaming you but it's like, yeah, true. That's true. What can we do about this. And that's why it was super crucial what we're sharing next now. So back to you Sally's about how we changed of the whole structure of the of the teams. Yes, the basic idea for us was opening up the people. Because generally, they case themselves, you know, with the with their thoughts, the way they are. So this did help us a lot. And moving forward, how did we change the way we work and our structure. So this is the way we worked in the circle. So there are different circles that we had created as automation circle, this operation circle, there's a support circle where, you know, the HR the quality, the trainer training and the agile coaching scrum masters, we all are, you know, supporting these guys to work upon. So people were also, I would say, when we integrated jobs, we created the rules. They were a little scared of it that will we lose our jobs in this, especially the middle management. So we had to create that awareness work upon it create growth paths in the entire circle, where we included the legal people as well. So this structure helped us in, you know, achieving our vision that on people front we have a global teams, which are created processes on process front we wanted to simplify and standardize the processes, and be, you know, solution providers on technology part we wanted to be a piloting enterprise with RPA for all the entire metro. So it was a big shift for Metro from becoming no pioneering partners from business providers to solution partners. So it was a big change. However, though, the global structure was done, unless we do day to day things, things don't change. I hope everybody, I'm sure other everybody would agree. So we do planning theoretically, you know, all the planning is done, but we need change that actually happens locally. You know, from the team, we all know these stages from forming to performing what happens. So we need standards, we need retrospectives, we need, you know, ceremonies are super important for all of us to be an effective team team bond is something really important that developed here. And especially post COVID this hybrid working model. It is a challenge that we found, you know, our team did actually did a fantastic job in getting the team together, conducting conducting these daily huddles, and their brainstorming sessions, be it building connections be it is conducting icebreakers and that to handling different countries. So the team has played a super important role here. And that's how, you know, we could achieve the vision that we were looking at. And I would. I want to show the toolbox that we used for for achieving this. So we tried to establish, you know, the new ways of working where we developed common okay as we had daily huddles, but where did we do all this so we, we, we all are into agility so we know we did maturity assessment, we did quarterly maturity assessment so that we, you know, in the iterative form so we keep doing it. We had planners with us. So we use the mirror board as well to conduct retrospectives mirror board I'm sure you must be knowing it's a digital whiteboard that we have. We used Microsoft Teams planner for handling the day to day task very efficiently. It worked for us. We had a channel for in the Microsoft Teams where we had created different types of tabs, the meeting invites were posted there. So basically what I'm trying to say is we created a one stop shop for the countries. The country had their own channels, they knew what is happening in the team. So no more they were working in silos, and they had every information available at one place. So this did help us and moving forward. So now that the teams move towards performing and we had few numbers. Now it was time to show our visibility and accountability to our Superbosses as well. Every country. This is the snapshot that we just posted it here that how did we do so we developed different KPIs for the countries we mentioned that how many scrum events we did for a particular country. Then these were the few KPIs that we developed for each country. So one was Transformation KPI, one was Team Energy, one was Teams Availability, Time Availability, Productivity and OKA settings. So this is how our Superbosses got the snapshot of it. And also the technical technicalities of it. How was the process improvement? Were any best practices shared? Was there any invoice extraction? All these technical things were also mentioned there. So in one slide they got the entire snapshot. If they wanted to deep dive, we had our scrum boards on Microsoft Teams. We had a retrospective on the Miro board. So everything was visible for everyone. So there was no disconnect. So even the leaders knew everything. Can you want to add something? Correct. And why, right? You would say, Oh no, but is it not over documenting again? Are we not going back into that all way of working? But here where we realize because it is the KPO area, so finance and control accounting, because they're used to, right? They're used to their nature of work is we trust is like when we can control, we can trust. So we also, they needed to know, OK, show us some numbers. So what do you mean with this, right? And then so we, that's why we, this is why we showed it to everyone here is the importance to still use that language which they have, so which they understand, right? Because we could have used a burned down child and burned down child and something like this, but then they would be like, what are we burning down, right? So it's more like, OK, no, this is the numbers and data you used to know. And since this was also digitalization and automation, so we knew we are going into that there's still invoices, which is going to be manual and partly it's going to be automated. So then they also wanted to know, like, is everything running fine because this is like there's a very specific financial impact, right? If this doesn't work out, we have to do something. And everyone was nervous anyhow from the beginning, like, oh my God, this is going to be bad and we're going to lose and like monies and we're going to be fined or whatever. So this is how we wanted just to show them saying, like, yeah, we are open and showing to everyone how it is going. And that's why we let's say use this old still reporting kind of style. So we will also later show some more this kind of where we just saw that is important to share because they're used to this. So we slowly pick them up and still use some of the old elements. Yes, thanks for adding that, Ken. Yes. So we saw the changes. The transformation was quite visible, I would say. And as Ken mentioned in his earlier talk that now the values were coming together. Now that we have gone through all that customer collaboration and everything. Now it was time to see the working product and responding to change as well. So, and of course, the result was expected result was satisfied customer working software, you know, we deliver frequently and consistently as well. So people responding to change or reacting to change, are they welcoming the changes, the team itself, are we striving for the excellence and is there a simplicity in our processes. This was a time to check on this. So, let's see what we achieved. You may, you know, see if you graph graphics here. So you may notice that automation rate, you know, increased as compared to the targeted automation rate in all the three countries. Our NPS score, that is the customer satisfaction score, did increase here. Whenever we have added the new roles, you know, be it solution owner, be it techno functional experts, you know, the ability to tackle the problem solving on their own. So we achieve this team design their okay hours and measured, measured it also to track the progress. So they did it, everything on their own. With this, we saw that the team spirit and motivation was absolutely on a high note, and they became more, I would say, self sustained. And automation moves away from, you know, from people dependent to process dependent. So it was no more of people dependent one which was a very happy situation for the organization and automation in all three countries became stable, which was super critical for the process. And of course the regular audit audit checks were kept us on track. Moving little forward. You may see these are few visuals where we can see good improvement on people process and technology front. So on technology front our automation rate increased on people front are quarterly maturity assessment showed us that there is an improvement in self organizing team. There was a good clarity for people had so we could achieve the transparency there and culture of the team as well. On the process front improvement areas were identified improvised and you can see our boards were stabilized which was super important for the team. Yeah, maybe just to add there right so this is I mean we know it in agility, like it totally makes sense and that's why it is like that. But since we brought people together there were so many new improvement projects right so many things popped up new because suddenly they sat together, and then they really really talk about saying like yeah this and this this doesn't work. And before they said it also. But somehow it never came right because the managers were meeting. They didn't really understand what the problem was. They just said something. So but since now all the relevant people the experts are sitting together. They could really say this doesn't work that doesn't work and then. Okay now I understand what you mean with this and they could really come up with new stuff. So this was really the power of being bringing everyone together which we know already but this is also then they saw that this works. And even today many times people who were in that group still they were like cannot we in different areas they want to also implement this way of working which is then more in that agility, which they saw and they want to do it. Yeah, so basically, that's just giving the overview of all that what we have been implementing so far. If we're right so we will see the next slide is just against we just basically we just took all the values and took all the principles, and just took them really serious and just said like, what if we really do it because many times in the in the training also before writers again we understand this, but do we really do it and we said yeah this time we really look at this. And we also saw that that's why that over is important right so individual interactions over processes and tools doesn't mean that we don't do it anymore but it's still super crucial that we still do whatever processes is there from the past and needs to be done because also in finance and accounting. There is always some legal stuff where we have to follow and then very crucial. And since money is going around also very crucial that everything works. So this is where we just took everything and saying like yeah we need to still follow a plan but we need to be able to respond to change. And yes we do have a contract negotiated we have an SLA how fast we have to deliver something with the, as an example invoices, but still we can collaborate with the customer and sometimes they understand, like I something's happening or we can now. They also now understand right I mean this is like simple but strength very strong is like, ah, before they didn't really understand maybe like how important some festivals were. And now they understood it more and they could plan it ahead and saying like okay the festival is coming up we understand that it's important for the colleagues so how can we manage it that it doesn't slow us down. Do we increase the volume before we do it afterwards, but everyone knew and understood each other better and could really work on it so there's no more blaming but it is really collaboratively working together and trying to solve always a problem. Yeah, so basically this picture is just to show right before it started. It was a restaurant now it's more becoming again a hybrid model of it so it can move, but it still has some stability. So, and yeah, the customer and everyone else is still happy working together. So this was the idea just to show that picture at the end, taking the elements but still adjust to that area because we cannot take agility one to one, which we are doing in the IT industry to other industries because they need some adaption, but we still have to be true to it because as we saw in the stories we were telling, it really works and yeah, that's why basically how it went. Yes. We would like to end with a quote that culture does not change because we desire to change it culture changes when the organization is transformed the culture reflects the realities of the people working together every day. So for us what worked and we worked on people. Thank you everyone. Hey, thanks Ken and Siley for sharing your experience with us today.