Bennett Voyles is a freelance writer and Janet Kersnar is editor-in-chief at CFO Europe.
Service with a Smile
Sometimes it takes soft skills to win a war. A war for talent, that is. Just ask Michael Cullen, who helped set up Marriott International's first shared service centre, in 2000, on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. The initial aim, says Cullen, senior vice president of business services at the $13 billion (€9 billion) Washington, DC-based hotel chain, was to serve 180 hotels in North America. This meant finding a location that satisfied language, cultural and time-zone requirements. Staying relatively close to home was also important. With such a large transformation effort to a decentralised finance function, the company thought hard about "the amount of change we wanted to introduce," he says.
These issues were revisited as the SSC grew and plans for an additional site were drawn up. "In 2007, before doubling our size — from 300 to 600 employees — we did consider both offshoring and outsourcing, and talked to a lot of other companies and economic development boards," he says. "But there was a strong economic value [at the existing Tennessee site] — even though this isn't a major or even secondary city. We wanted to leverage the operating model that we have here. Not that we're not open to moving somewhere else."
And more expansion lies ahead. Cullen says head office has just given the green light to expand Marriott's SSC, as services for around 50 non-US hotels will be added to the model over the next 12 to 18 months. "Once we reach critical mass, we'll start looking outside of the US," he says.
When that happens, Cullen will undoubtedly want to replicate Tennessee's success, which will be no small feat. "Our reputation over the past seven years is that we've become the employer of choice," he says, noting that attrition is in the low-to-mid teens and two local job fairs this summer attracted 170 applications. A recent benchmarking project also showed that the centre is among the best in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness.
There's another reason why the centre is attractive. Cullen says that because finance was so decentralised, if someone wanted to move up the career ladder it required picking up and regularly relocating from one office to another, something he's done eight times in the 25 years that he's been with the hotel company. Though there are still opportunities at headquarters or at any of Marriott's hotels, "now people can be promoted without having to change their address," he says. "That's a pretty powerful, motivating factor."
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