Introduction Making the transition from decentralized processing for back-office processes to Shared Services, where teams support many different company operations that are often long distances and multiple time zones away, requires process standards and consistency.  While it’s been decades since an employee making a change to their withholdings, or processing a requisition for office supplies, […]

Introduction The foundation of any Shared Services organization is its people. As leaders, it’s critical to create an environment that keeps them engaged through a combination of challenging assignments, coaching and mentoring, a career path, and well-designed compensation and incentive programs.  In a recent Peeriosity PeercastTM, representatives from a Peeriosity member company shared what they […]

Introduction Many Shared Services organizations span multiple geographies, with a requirement for team members who speak multiple languages. In addition to supporting live conversations, internal communication materials for team members including periodic newsletters and reports to the Global Shared Service organization are often provided. For some companies, these materials may be published in one language […]

Introduction Quality, along with cost, productivity, and customer satisfaction, has always been one of the four primary measures of success in Shared Services.  There are a variety of approaches to achieving high levels of quality performance, with some companies utilizing formal quality programs, such as Lean and Six Sigma, and others developing their own approach […]

Introduction Over the past few decades, the Shared Services model has become increasingly popular as more companies adopt this powerful organizational design.  As the model has matured, the number of alternative designs has also increased, with a variety of options with varying levels of integration and complexity now available to companies, all with their advantages […]

Introduction The use of Global Process Owners is an organizational design that has been around for a number of years now and is widely accepted at most companies utilizing a Shared Services organizational structure.  While the concept of the Global Process Owner is to provide consistency and standardization in major process areas, such as Purchase-to-Pay […]

Introduction Ensuring that your Shared Services operation is appropriately branded can help to properly position this critical organization within your company.  Due in part to the transactional nature of many processes typically found within Shared Services, employees, business partners, and even key stakeholders may not understand the role of Shared Services and the value it […]

Introduction Outsourcing back-office processes that are often found in a Shared Services center continues to be popular as external service providers improve the quality of their services and methods for how to best transfer and manage work processes become routine.  Outsourcing isn’t a “one size fits all” approach, nor is it possible to flip responsibility […]

Introduction A number of major corporations have recently created an Enterprise Reporting Services operation as part of their Shared Services organization.  This group provides reporting and analysis services to a variety of key areas of the company, such as Marketing, Finance, and Procurement.  This research abstract looks at the experiences of a major multi-national corporation […]

Introduction With a wide selection of viable geographic location options in Latin America, many large corporations have chosen to locate significant Shared Services organizations in that part of the world. There are a variety of reasons for doing so, including leveraging an existing company location, a well-educated workforce, favorable labor arbitrage, a well-developed infrastructure, the […]