BP began to promote COE, and its strategic position became more important.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Central European Business Review” (ID: ceibs-cbr), Author: Mu-sheng, responsibility Editor: Huan Division.
Nowadays, organizations have a “BP-oriented” trend. What is the reason behind this change? What is the direction? What stage is it advancing to? What are the difficulties in the future? This topic selects domestic first-class Internet companies such as BATM (ByteDance, Ali, Tencent, Meituan), JD.com, and Huawei and Haier, two traditional companies that are at the forefront of organizational innovation. Explore.
CBR essence first look:
01. With development, the conflicts of organization’s delegation, incentives, and empowerment need to be balanced by BP urgently.
02. BP under the traditional structure is promoted by COE and has limited space to play. It is more like a “policy police.”
03. At this stage, BP is starting to drive COE; besides BP appearing in the front-line business unit to solve the “mezzanine” problem, there is also a trend that the middle and back offices also start to build BP.
Currently, it has become a trend for back-office functional departments to send business partners (Business Partners, hereinafter referred to as “BP”) to mid- and front-office business departments. Not only the traditional “Human BP (HRBP)” and “Finance BP (FBP)” continue to be active, but BPs in the strategy and legal departments have also begun to appear, and the entire organization seems to be “BP-oriented”.
In the Internet era, when the front-line business units require extreme flexibility, require authorization, incentives, and empowerment to sink, it will inevitably challenge the top-level policies of the company’s human, financial, and legal functional management institutions, and BP has naturally become a balance An equalizer of the contradiction between “management” and “management”.
BPization, the general trend
Specifically, there may be three reasons for organizational transformation to “BP”:
The first is to solve the authorization problem, and to balance between “one control and death” and “just release and chaos”.
The market is unpredictable. Companies want frontline personnel who can hear the artillery to call for artillery, but they dare not give unlimited authorization to the frontline. In fact, every boss has an inconvenient decision-making principle in his heart-they would rather the company develop slowly than “out of control”, they would rather “die once in charge” than “just let go of chaos.” At this time, BP acts as a balance point for authorization. They represent the company’s interests and enter the business as a special commissioner, allowing the operation of power to form an “invisible boundary” and solving the problem of anxiety after the boss is authorized.
The second is to solve the incentive problem and balance the “one size fits all policy” and “localization needs”.
In order to take care of the whole, the incentive policy in the background/p>
New trend: Mezzanine appears
At this stage, the logic of COE’s promotion of BP seems to have changed. BP began to promote COE, and its strategic position became more important. In some companies, BP even performs part of the COE function, that is, inside-out through “switching positions”: BP often returns to the COE to formulate policies with a first-line perception, and then returns to the business department with the policy to do it. Implementation on the ground.
We use Bytedance, Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com as our benchmark companies, as well as Huawei and Haier, two traditional companies that are at the forefront of organizational innovation. According to the HRBP published on the public recruitment website. And FBP job description as basis for analysis. At present, there are two main types of BPs, and their positioning and responsibilities are undergoing significant changes.
The first category is BP at the business department (BD), business group (BG), and business unit (BU) levels. This role is similar to a small CFO or a small CHO. Many companies do not use the name of BP when recruiting, but directly give the title of the financial director or human resources director. In order to realize the flexible operations of the business department, it is necessary for the enterprise to establish a functional system such as human resources and finance for it, but from an economic point of view, it is obviously impossible to refer to the scale of the functional system of the headquarters. Therefore, setting FBP and HRBP has become an inevitable choice.
The second category is BP at all levels under the division, and this type of role is more performant. In the traditional model, it seems that they only need to follow the policy rules confirmed by the business department BP to ensure that the regional business departments follow the rules. But “budget management” sinks directly to “process management” without any buffer based on business logic, which is a very rigid model. This rigidity has caused BPs to coordinate the differences between headquarters and business departments only by “brushing their faces”.
Now, Dachang seems to be aware of this problem, and began to add a “mezzanine” to “budget management” and “process management”-emphasizing customized localization policies based on business, so that the budget can be more reasonably allocated to the business , In order to achieve more direct incentives and empowerment. This type of demand has never appeared in the job descriptions and quality requirements of the previous two types of BP.
Taking FBP as an example, the new requirements of benchmarking enterprise job descriptions can be summarized as “establishing a financial model based on business” and “locking key indicators” (Table 1). Although ByteDance did not put forward such requirements for the role of FBP, it has designed a “business analysis” or “operation analysis” post for similar functions. It can be said that they put the focus of this function on the business side, and tend to use the analysis of business data to drive the analysis of financial data.
Table 1: New requirements for FBP job descriptions for benchmarking companies
Source: Mu Sheng Enterprise Management Consulting Firm
In terms of HRBP, the new requirements of benchmarking enterprise job descriptions are mainly to “make human resource strategies based on business and provide human resource solutions” (Table 2). Regrettably, in the job descriptions of most HRBPs of major manufacturers, we did not find any part of human resource quantitative models or human efficiency management. Only Huawei mentioned that “aligning relevant human resources indicators with HRM, through the development of various human resources This kind of special work, as well as the analysis of human resources data, effectively supports the development of the business”. We speculate that this comes from Huawei’s powerful human resources data system. They not only have a huge data warehouse formed by the W3 system, but also have data-based research projects that are promoted every year. The strength in this area is indeed strong.
Table 2: New HRBP job descriptions for benchmarking companies Request
Source: Mu Sheng Enterprise Management Consulting Firm
The above requirements are all based on specific business. After all, in the past, BP could rigidly apply the policies of the headquarters, but now BP needs to apply this model locally, establish specific business financial models and human resources models, and provide customized incentives and empowerment. The high requirements not only opened up new space for BP’s career, but also challenged the upper limit of BP’s capabilities.
At the same time, we also discovered the third type of BP, the middle and back BP. This is a new role. For example, Huawei has allocated financial resources for manufacturing, supply chain, and quality departments.