Case Study:

A global consulting company decided to centralize some of its finance and human resource related activities from its Asia-Pacific operations in China. An international project was initiated to move processes like time and expense management, accounts payable, and labour contracting from the South, South-East and East Asian subsidiaries to the People's Republic of China. Overall, 12 different countries were involved in the project. What kinds of risks were anticipated? What came as a surprise?

Language barriers were seen as a risk and planned for: some employees who could speak both Mandarin and Japanese or Mandarin and Korean were hired in order to overcome communication barriers with the Japanese and Korean subsidiaries.

Insufficient language qualification of newly hired staff in China: this risk was also anticipated. Readily available templates, for all kinds of email communication, helped local employees with their jobs. Ninety per cent of the information exchange between the Shared Service Centre and its customers was in writing. Hence, templates were very useful.

Shared Service Centres only work if all the participating parties follow standardized processes. There was the anticipated risk that staff in the various Asia-Pacific subsidiaries would try to cling to their old habits and processes, avoiding the Shared Service Centre. This risk was counteracted by a very strict and tight software user regime. With the launch of the new SSC, user rights in the subsidiaries were strictly limited to force employees to follow the new, standardized processes.

Shortly before the launch of the new Shared Service Centre, a major issue appeared: the selected software system which should support the centre's activities could not handle East Asian language characters. This nearly turned out to be a 'show stopper'. Only at the last minute could software developers find a way around this problem.

The question: explain the cultural differences between the involved countries.