By Nick Heath, 1 May 2009 17:20
NEWS
...with the company setting up a captive in Budapest in 2002, initially acting as a European shared service centre but later providing financial processing services to the US, Mexico and Australia.
Diageo gradually shifted more financial support services from its offices in London to Budapest, such as the treasury function and centralised reporting.
Speaking at the FT conference Carolyn Isaacs, global shared services director of strategy and transition for Diageo, said: "We had got to a stage where we had proved we could make it work for a number of our markets around the globe but we realised that for markets such as those in Asia and Africa the costs did not work.
"That was where we looked at leveraging a partner to look at outsourcing as well."
About 15 months ago Diageo chose Accenture, which today runs centres in Madrid, Manila, Bucharest and Shanghai, handling a variety of IT services such as application development and support.
Isaacs said that bringing in an outsourcer brought numerous benefits, including mitigating the risk of relying on a single offshore site, access to more languages and ability to shift services between locations.
"We wanted to provide shared services that flex according to our business," she said.
"We will look at outsourcing other services where we believe we could get the same service and control but at a lower cost. We have moved some activities from captive to outsource but we always want to ensure the level of service at both.
"I would very much regard our future as about combining captive and outsourcing in a hybrid model."
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