Brandix projects 'mercurial' growth through shared services

Sri Lanka's top apparel exporter Brandix has implemented the first stage of a visionary plan to take the apparel solutions provider beyond the manufacture and export of apparel to becoming a massive knowledge-based company that could 'in-source' the business processing requirements of top international retail brands.

The company inaugurated Brandix Mercury, a sophisticated Shared Services Centre (SSC) at the World Trade Centre in Colombo to drive a Transformation for Growth or 'T4G' plan that will initially undertake an optimisation of financial processes across the group and be a strategic partner to its 25 business units.

Mandated to bring about a measurable group-wide increase in efficiency by providing centralised transaction processing to decision-support, the Centre has already taken over 95 per cent of the financial accounting processes of the Brandix Group and brought together most of the personnel responsible for these processes.

Brandix Chairman, Ken Balendra said the Shared Services Centre was an initiative that the Board had backed to the hilt. Pointing out that the establishment of such centres is now the trend the world over, he said, he looked forward to hearing of the vast strides and material benefits that would arise as a result of this initiative.

Brandix CEO Ashroff Omar said the Centre has the potential to expand its capabilities to offer similar value-added services to its top international customer base. Stressing that "our vision is to grow this into a massive knowledge-based company," Omar said: "We have excellent contacts with the world's best brands and the best retailers.

Extending our concept of inspired solutions to encompass value-added services is therefore a logical step."

According to Chief Operating Officer-Group Treasury and Business Services, Kishan Jayasekera, the Centre's remit will cover people, processes and technology and its role will encompass driving process excellence, customer satisfaction and cost reduction, managing risk and measuring and monitoring business performance.