08 Apr What Dell Can Teach us about How to Streamline Global Mobility Processes

If a company like Dell succeeds in streamlining its global mobility processes, practitioners and other players in the industry cannot help but sit up and take notice. As TalentCulture explains it, the transformation that the organization went through was complex and far from the usual.

To begin with, Dell has always been known as a legacy company, more identified with brick-and-mortar services rather than speedy tech platforms. However, it required a radical change that would support sustainability once it acquired the billion-dollar tech firm EMC in 2016. Not only would its core business be impacted and redefined, but so would its operations and talent management.

During that important year, Dell’s personnel expanded to more than 130,000 staff spread across a variety of continents and regions. Its international network broadened to cover its large subsidiaries all over the world, including Dell EMC, VMWare, and Virtustream.

The people it employed had to align with the overall business mission and vision. At the same time, this new Dell had to respect the unique culture, traditions, and laws that were prevalent in the different countries where their offices were based. Relocation as assignees were sent from one Dell country office to another also had to be efficient and seamless, minimizing adjustment, acculturation, and work slowdown.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dell turned to the one factor that also rebranded itself in the digital age: technology. It used cutting-edge resources to streamline its processes while boosting the performance and morale of its personnel.

These are three of the aspects where Dell used technology to continue its evolution and make itself a more robust and stronger company. Global mobility managers facing the same challenges might take a page or two from its book.

Dimensional reporting. As described by IBM, this kind of reportage shifts through tons of data and makes its final analyses more comprehensible and clearer by illustrating them through maps and charts. Information is classified and categorized. The levels of importance of their many pockets of information can also be highlighted through layering. Dimensional reporting gives more than a cursory or surface view of the data that is being presented and the situation that it is representing.

Leaders going through it will understand the numerous aspects of an event or a trend. They can also see how one layer of information relates to another that is seemingly unconnected. All these result in a huge picture of the organization’s current status, forecasts into the future, and steps it needs to take — all in a very global scale.

Once the next frontier has been analyzed and the next steps strategized, what follows is financial planning that can make those steps possible. At the same time, present resources have to be optimized, and unnecessary risks reduced. But this is easier said than done.

Global mobility managers know all too well the difficulty of tracking down and accounting the expenses of assignees in one city, let alone in one region. Dell simplified its process and side-stepped a potential minefield by employing a software that could execute accurate and real-time project management. At the same time, its analysis could also come up with financial forecasts of how much certain programs will cost, and how much ROI they can possibly bring.

Global mobility managers might adopt this tactic and bring it a few steps further. Why not use another tech solution to study not just the numbers, but the reasons behind them. The Mole Post Gazette enumerates them as follows: market opportunities, market constraints, and factors that can enhance or slow down competitiveness.

Finally, Dell employed tech tools to expedite and make seamless an assignee’s relocation from one office to another. Capterra’s list shows how the software can make life easier for the global mobility manager. Options for vendors can easily be shortlisted and then narrowed down to the final choice. Each phase of the relocation process can be tracked down. Compliance with the budget forecasted for the entire move can be followed rigorously, with any unexpected costs noted and immediately escalated to the higher-ups.

Innovation is the name of the game that can make certain organizations stand out above others. As Dell and places like Northern California have found out, technology is a valuable ally in transformation. It’s about time that global mobility managers likewise embrace the process and the technology.