The Center currently has 200 employees and has become the hub of Becton Dickinson’s American operations, providing services to seven countries in three languages.
The US medical technology multinational Becton Dickinson (BD) chose Chile to set up its Latin American Shared Services Center (LA SSC); it proved so successful that it has gone from strength to strength ever since.
In 2011, Becton Dickinson opened a pilot center in Chile that offered a few services to Spanish-speaking countries in South America. Two years later, the initial team of four people had grown to fifteen and the company was planning to expand its workforce to 55 in order to incorporate processes in Brazil and Mexico. This objective was met in the following years and, in the ten years that the Chilean center has been in operation, it has exceeded all expectations.
Cristian Lorenzo, Associate Director of the Latin American Shared Services Center, points out that this success has been down to the quality of the employees that the company has found in Chile. “By the fifth year, the Latin American Shared Services Center was so well-known for the quality and efficiency of its services that the company decided to explore the possibility of transferring more of its workload there from the United States and the rest of the world,” Mr. Lorenzo explained.
The Center currently has 200 employees and has become the hub of Becton Dickinson’s American operations, providing services to seven countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and the United States) in three languages (Spanish, Portuguese and English).
When it was deciding where to set up in the region, the company carried out a feasibility study in which Chile prevailed over the other four possible countries. “The determining factors were Chile’s business focus, its economic and political stability, and its infrastructure,” Mr. Lorenzo specified.
He added that the support of InvestChile has been fundamental throughout the process, “from helping us search for information, providing advice and putting us in contact with other companies that have invested in Chile, through to applying to Chile’s Economic Development Agency CORFO’s program.”
The expansion of the Center in recent years has meant that US$7.5 million have now been invested in hiring and training human capital and building offices.
The Latin American Shared Services Center is aligned with the company’s Global Finance Transformation program, which makes use of four centers around the world, located in the United States, Malaysia, Poland and Chile. The company's model is based on continuous development through innovation.
The work is managed by diverse and inclusive teams, so that professionals from different countries around the world are connected virtually, without the need to share an office.
“The Shared Services Center is an organizational unit that provides back-office support to the company’s internal divisions and is always looking for opportunities to improve our systems and processes.
This work guarantees better information control and allows the company’s commercial divisions to concentrate their efforts on the business’s core activities. The Center operates remotely from one site in Santiago and carries out tasks that support the regular activities of the company’s other divisions throughout Latin America and the United States,” explained Marco Musitano, General Director of Becton Dickinson’s Southern Cone commercial sector.
Plans for the future
Becton Dickinson’s Shared Services Center in Chile has set itself the goal of increasing productivity in 2021 through adopting new technologies and simplifying processes. This challenge is expected to generate new jobs in Human Resources, Master Data, Digital Marketing and Finance with a view to the future, by 2025.
The Center will look to streamline its processes and operations, so that it can interact with countries in different time zones through a “follow the sun” approach. This will provide its clients with the opportunity to be 100% connected, 24 hours a day, irrespective of where they are.
While the pandemic has led to all of the Center’s staff currently working remotely, the company forecasts that by the end of 2021, some 30% of its workforce will be teleworking on a permanent basis. This will provide a greater level of flexibility to employees, wherever they live, and offer more job opportunities throughout the whole of Chile.
For learn more about business opportunities in Chile, see this article.
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