Amoco European Shared Services

"I worked with Terri for 3 years, in my role as MD for Amoco's European Shared Services, and found her counsel to be inspiring and always appropriate for the situation. Terri brings a great combination of theory, business sense and fun to her implementation plans and she is equally capable of handling large group seminars as well as small Leadership teams. I personally thoroughly enjoyed her facilitation of our meetings and know that my team members have come away with lasting lessons learned."
Gerry D'Souza -Sr VP Commercial Marketing, Downstream, USA. BP

Before setting up Inspire, Terri spent 4 years supporting the set up and development of Amoco’s European Shared Services organisation.

Business Challenge

When Amoco decided to introduce a Shared Services organisation that would provide a single, unified resource for HR, Procurement, IT, Finance and Health & Safety across seven European locations, Terri McNerney was asked to act as change consultant on the project.
Amoco’s key objectives were to:

  • Discover, understand and utilise the key success drivers identified by staff in each of the three participating businesses: Amoco Oil & Gas, Amoco Chemicals and Amoco Fabrics
  • Successfully integrate 700 people spread across seven countries into one virtual team that would become the new European Shared Services (ESS) organisation
  • Clarify and achieve buy-in to the vision and direction of Amoco ESS
  • Create a culture of innovation, teamwork and trust.

How Terri McNerney Helped

For the first 2 years, Terri’s role involved facilitating the IT, Finance, Procurement, Environmental Health & Safety and HR European leadership teams’ monthly meetings in Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. She worked closely with the teams as they addressed strategy, structure, processes, roles and people challenges.
Key areas focused on:

  • creating cross-cultural understanding
  • building trust and confidence and
  • addressing controversial business issues as they arose.

Terri was later involved in developing and facilitating the top team, which was leading the ESS strategy. This team comprised a European Managing Director and seven Functional Heads of Business. She supported them in translating US Shared Services requirements into workable solutions, and maintained the team’s focus on customer service by coordinating the group’s Customer Satisfaction Surveys and co-ordinating the key actions that followed.

Terri also designed and facilitated a 2-day European Team Leadership workshop for 100 ESS managers, which provided an opportunity for the virtual management team to:

  • meet for the first time
  • explore service needs
  • build relationships and
  • provide input into the draft Business Plan, based on the Malcolm Baldrige model.

Outcomes

The change consultancy provided by Terri enabled streamlined, cost-effective and connected business teams to emerge. By actively exploring sensitive issues and encouraging open cross-cultural debates and resolutions, Terri helped the teams to learn how they could work most successfully together. The integration project was extremely successful and the following achievements were delivered:

  • The European Procurement team negotiated and won a substantial number of Europe-wide contracts at a reduced cost.
  • The European IT team found it easier to bring all locations up to a standard computing environment.
  • The whole of the European Telecoms network was outsourced, resulting in lower costs, increased flexibility and reduced cycle time to add/remove new locations.
  • Financial processes were reviewed and aligned across Europe in conjunction with the SAP project.
  • Best practices in Environmental Health and Safety were shared and implemented across Europe.
  • New acquisitions, clients and closures were managed cross functionally, allowing for a more integrated approach, incurring less time, cost and avoiding duplication.
  • A European HR Framework was put in place, enabling greater mobility and career opportunities.