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Shared Services

The last fifteen years have seen a frenzy of organisational change through mergers and acquisitions, spin-offs and organic growth. Often these moves haven’t provided the expected boost to the bottom line. That can be because they struggle to consolidate a tangle of competing infrastructures. Shared service centres can help rationalise operations, strip out duplication, and deliver common processes centrally.

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The secret is to create an efficient centre while still meeting the individual needs of operating units. The payoff for moving successfully to a shared services centre is to reduce costs while maintaining or enhancing services to operating units. Yet not all shared service centres deliver those benefits.

The key is not just to gather staff and technology in one place, pick a single application for each operational area and migrate all users across to it. A shared services centre also needs an effective governance model. This allows it to:

• fairly balance competing requests from different business units;
• ensure changes made to meet a request from one set of users do not affect the services currently being delivered to other groups;
• aggregate applications, infrastructure and support services into service bundles that allow users to understand what they are paying for and what level of service they can expect;
• develop more easily enforceable standard policies to meet regulatory obligations or provide enhanced security; and
• introduce more cost-effective or flexible infrastructure while ensuring services to users are not disrupted.

Centrix helps clients develop effective governance for their shared service centres. We also work with them to create processes that help them bring new applications or operating units into the service centre quickly and smoothly.

Once the service centre is up and running, Centrix can help senior executives decide on and carry out their long-term strategy for delivering support services. Further cost savings could be achieved by outsourcing or offshoring particular service bundles. Alternatively, if the service centre is delivering high levels of service profitably, it could be turned into a profit centre offering service bundles to others.