INDUSTRY
Education
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Overview
The British Council is a global leader in English language learning and cultural relations, reaching over 600 million people across more than 100 countries. With a mission to build connections, understanding, and trust, the organisation operates at a massive scale, delivering educational opportunities and fostering international collaboration.
To maintain its competitive edge and deliver on its mission, the British Council embarked on a major transformation journey. At the core of this transformation was a need to modernise and unify its global professional services, spanning finance, procurement, HR, service desk, and IT, across complex systems and regions. The organisation required a partner who could co-create a modern digital backbone while aligning closely with their values in education, inclusion, and sustainability.
To drive this vision forward, the British Council partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global leader in IT services, consulting and business solutions.
Future-Ready and Digitally Powered: TCS transforms British Council’s Global Professional Services
Challenge
Operating across diverse geographies and regulatory environments, the British Council faced significant complexity in its core operations. Its professional services were fragmented, with legacy systems and processes that hindered agility, efficiency and scalability.
Key challenges included:
- Limited visibility into financial and operational data
- Inefficient manual processes in finance, HR, and procurement
- The need to enhance employee and customer experiences
- A pressing requirement to reduce operational costs while maintaining service quality
- The organisation needed a transformation partner who could deliver at scale, align with its values, and co-create a roadmap for sustainable growth.
Solution
TCS leveraged structured methodologies, deep domain knowledge and digital transformation expertise to re-imagine British Council’s operations with a balanced focus on people, processes, and technology. By combining a consulting-led approach, contextual intelligence, and the power of Cognix™, an AI-driven human-machine collaboration suite, TCS is enabling British Council to reshape their key professional services.
A comprehensive transformation strategy is being implemented across core service areas:
Finance
In the finance function, TCS enhanced the automation in the invoice processing system using intelligent automation, which reduced manual workload. Advanced analytics and business intelligence dashboards are being deployed to offer real-time visibility into cash flows and accounts receivable. Over time, these enhancements will enable the British Council to better manage working capital and strengthen financial control.
Human Resources
In Human Resources, TCS is introducing a digital adoption platform alongside an integrated service desk to streamline HR operations. The onboarding process, background verification, payroll processing, and workforce analytics are all being automated. This will result in faster and more consistent outcomes.
Procurement
TCS is implementing a next-generation procurement solution to digitise sourcing and contract management processes and provide an end-to-end procurement solution. Automation is applied to routine transactional tasks such as purchase orders and approvals, while an advanced spend and supplier performance analytics solution is being developed to track supplier performance and manage supplier spend more effectively.
Benefits
The transformation being delivered by TCS is enabling the following benefits:
- Improved operational cost savings across professional services
- The platform to deliver enhanced financial integrity and visibility across 100+ countries
- An improved year-end close
- Sustained CSAT performance
- Agile and resilient operations powered by automation and analytics
- Standardised global service delivery model now operationalised
- The solution was designed to ensure a seamless transition while laying the foundation for long-term agility and efficiency
Watch this video to hear Eleanor Hampson, Director of Global Business Services at the British Council, talk about TCS’s pivotal role in helping the British Council transform the organisation’s Professional Services function by implementing standardised processes, leveraging advanced technologies, and driving long-term financial sustainability and strategic growth.
The strategic partnership and transformation initiative led by TCS is delivering measurable improvements across financial performance and operational efficiency with an ambition to translate this into an improved employee experience for the British Council.
It is critical that we continue to transform the British Council to ensure long term financial sustainability and growth. We believe that TCS is the right partner to help us achieve our vision of modernising and improving our Professional Services function.