Corporate centre: shared services and cost for a major telco
TELECOMMUNICATIONS · OPERATING MODEL · COST
The situation
A dominant national telecommunications provider was being reshaped by technology change, deregulation, and a shift from legacy networks to data, internet, and wireless. Its corporate centre had grown to support international and non-traditional products, but support functions stayed decentralised, with process variation, excessive hand-offs, and an inflated back office: more than $1.3 billion in fixed overhead and a headcount above 3,450, in a governance model that had not been challenged against the new environment. Costs were tracked at static cost centres, not by activity, so executives could not see the demand each business unit drove.
The work
We ran a corporate-centre review across three concurrent workstreams: the centre's operating model, a functional cost review, and a transition plan.
Tested parenting archetypes, from holding company to corporate operator, against the portfolio to set the right level of corporate intervention, and defined the centre around five core value levers.
Designed a single global technology model and a consolidated shared-services blueprint for finance, with a right-sized HR ratio and consolidated legal and procurement.
Used activity-based costing to expose duplication, and built a staged value-release plan with weekly executive gates and a 30, 60, and 90-day sequence.
The outcome
A cost blueprint driving overhead toward global telco benchmarks.
A model designed to remove more than twenty per cent of duplicated back-office work.
Board consensus across corporate, business-unit, and operational leaders on target roles and shared systems.