As global enterprises seek to enhance agility and cost-effectiveness to adapt to rapidly evolving economic landscape, the role of business process centralization has become more significant. The City of Łódź, emerges as a one of key players in this domain, offering a compelling environment for the development and expansion of Global Business Services sector.
Key insights
More than 66% of surveyed GBS located in Łódź provide their services for business operations worldwide, with only 20% operating solely on a Europe-wide scale.
60% of surveyed GBS’s have increased the scope of operations, and 47% of respondents planned to expand their portfolio further in the next 2-3 years.
86% of respondents provide knowledge-intensive processes in their centers, and more than half of them inform that these processes have majority share of their process portfolio.
Maturity of Łódź GBS sector
The maturity of Łódź GBS centers is highlighted by the high amount of expert-level processes in the process portfolio mix. The findings suggest that Łódź is becoming an important hub for knowledge intensive processes. In total, more than half of respondents have stated that knowledge-based process make up 50% or more of all the processes in the center’s service portfolio.
Change is especially observable in the variety of the processes delivered by the GBS’s. While the major processes are tied to Finance&Accounting, processes such as Data, Analytics, HR, Procurement, It or Automation stand for the large share of the process portfolio mix. Sixty percent of respondents expanded their process portfolio in the past 12 months, and almost half of the respondents expect their process portfolio to grow in the next 2–3 years. Main areas of development acknowledged by the respondents are process optimization and focus on automation and AI implementation. The maturity of the sector is once again underlined by the increasing amount of knowledge-intensive processes delivered by the local GBS sector, with steady growth momentum showcased by the majority of surveyed centers.
Overtaking of Global Functions and Capabilities
The majority of centers located in Łódź employs less than 1000 professionals, but that doesn’t limit the reach of their operations.
Two thirds of surveyed centers provide services with global outreach which further supports the global capabilities. Majority of respondents already determined that their GBS is delivering high contribution to the specific global and regional initiatives.
A third of respondents confirmed that Łódź has already been recognized as a suitable location for expanding C-level or enterprise-wide functions, with staggering 53% determining that it has potential to expand such functions under certain conditions. 60% of all surveyed centers highly contributes to global or regional strategic decision making. 20% is fully integrated which means they are a strategic hub of the organization.
Adaptation to Digital Transformation
The impact of the AI wave can be clearly observed directly in our research findings. The study have shown that majority of the interviewed companies are planning to execute at least partial implementations of artificial intelligence solutions across their operations. On one hand it shows a great agility of the GBS sector, as companies strive to increase the effectiveness by using new tools to improve their operations. On the other – it demonstrates that the management understands the need for adapting these solutions, and not rejecting them as a temporary tendency. As such, the demand for the companies providing such solutions or the ones that have already implemented it will be exponentially higher in the upcoming years. The findings of the study in this area were quite persistent across all respondents, despite the differences in company size, process portfolio or the geographical scope of the services. The name of the game in the GBS sector is process optimization, and the further implementation of the AI solution seem to be perfectly aligned with that goal.
Łódź has long demonstrated that transformation can be a genuine driver of growth. The scale of the local modern business services sector and the city’s expanding technological capabilities confirm that Łódź attracts increasingly complex projects. Companies find both highly skilled specialists and an ecosystem that supports the development of future-oriented competencies. As knowledge-intensive and AI-enabled functions gain importance, Łódź has the opportunity not only to strengthen its position among European business locations, but also to gradually reshape how investors perceive the city. A few years ago, Łódź was viewed primarily through the lens of labour cost advantages. Today, attention is drawn to the broad spectrum of skills and expertise that organisations can readily access by locating their operations here.
GBS Next Stop: Łódź, Poland
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