There are a variety of approaches to providing the appropriate level of support to customers and suppliers of Shared Services, depending on such factors as the geographic scope of the company, the types of services provided by the center, and support levels offered by other organizations within the company. For multi-national Shared Services operations, the […]
When implementing global HR or Employee Shared Services, the importance of careful process design, people management, and leveraging of available technologies are all important factors to achieving a successful outcome. Ensuring the delivery of “world-class people services” when process delivery moves from onsite and face-to-face to remote delivery with no personal relationship between the employee […]
The use of a call center, help desk, or service desk to provide a focused point of contact for internal and external customer inquiries can be effective in reducing costs and complexity, as well as a method to capture and categorize reasons for process variations and defects by formalizing the response process and analyzing the […]
Ensuring the proper segregation of duties for different roles within a company, as well as the proper assignment and monitoring of sensitive system access by employees, are both important controls that all Shared Services operations are involved into one degree or another. As the scope of Shared Services expands at many companies, the adequate focus […]
Dealing with the many complex issues surrounding the procurement of services is a challenge that every company faces to one degree or another. Often, the solutions implemented in this area of Procure-to-Pay are workarounds that may accomplish the task at hand, but are filled with manual processing and less than ideal controls. Even with the […]
There are a variety of different configurations that companies can utilize for the facility design of their Shared Services operation. Whether all employees are located in the same facility, separated somewhat in the same local vicinity, or spread out across a large geographic area, emphasis needs to be placed on developing a cohesive organization, especially […]
With the introduction of sophisticated Travel Expense software, complete with pre-populated expense line items, and automatic checks of merchant category codes (MCC) for appropriateness; combined with the move from cash advances and the requirement to have all expenses on a credit card, the risk of loss due to errors or intentional fraud has been reduced […]
Using methodologies that were perfected two or three decades ago, Organizational Change Management (OCM) applies a structured approach that increases the probabilities that change projects will be implemented smoothly, successfully, and with long-lasting results. While the importance of change management as a discipline has been proven, formally using in-house experts in change management in Shared […]
At many companies, the Payroll function is carried out in several locations and often on disparate systems. In numerous cases, this type of structure can be the result of mergers and acquisitions, as well as the desire of the business units to be more autonomous. Regardless, the benefits of having a consolidated Payroll function are […]
The expansion of the Shared Services model continues to evolve, from single-process centers using captive resources, to multi-functional centers using captive and outsourced resources and expanding scope up and down the end-to-end process stream. Once considered a final stretch objective, “Global Shared Services” expanded to “Global Business Services”, with a new model “Integrated Business Services” […]