Introduced 30 years ago, and achieving widespread acceptance during the past decade, purchasing cards have become commonplace as a method to reduce the cost and complexity associated with purchasing low price expense items. While the impact of reducing processing costs has been significant, for many companies the purchasing card process is years behind the travel […]
While there are many benefits to implementing integrated software systems and bolt-on technologies, significant performance improvements are often possible from a direct inspection and redesign of underlying work processes. While it’s never a good idea to automate a bad process, it’s always a good idea to formally review process steps on a regular basis to […]
Achieving low cost per transaction in Accounts Payable (AP) requires effort on many fronts, including getting low dollar non-inventory items onto a purchasing card, increasing the first pass match rate, and perhaps of greatest importance, high rates of processing using either a form of Evaluated Receipts Settlement or the electronic receipt of invoices. In fact, […]
While reducing the number of pay cycles typically has the greatest impact on overall Payroll processing costs, eliminating special handling exceptions that require manual processing and physical checks can have a big impact on total processing costs. The HR department’s assumption that there needs to be a manual check-in hand at the exit interview, particularly […]
Energy costs are one of the largest expense categories a company has, which makes it a priority to understand and manage utility-related data. Yes, if the lights were out last month at one of your company locations, you probably need to pay the electric bill; however, the process of managing utility payments is more complicated […]
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 added new requirements for public companies doing business in the United States to ensure the accuracy and integrity of financial information. Since the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), many other countries passed similar reforms, with each company determining the optimal structure for meeting compliance requirements. With Shared Services often being the […]
When you consider the types of processes that are most commonly found in Shared Services, it is only within the past decade that companies seriously considered moving external customer-facing processes to a Shared Services model. In fact, today Accounts Payable is still twice as likely to be in Shared Services than the Order-to-Cash processes of […]
The world’s leading Shared Services organizations have a clear understanding that ongoing success requires an embedded culture where operational excellence is pursued aggressively at all levels of the organization. It is no coincidence that the top performers are the most likely to be active participants in best practice research communities. “Being the best” is a […]
Peeriosity benchmarking data suggests that, while many companies embrace the idea of moving towards a Global Business Services model with a broad scope of services and a large geographic footprint, less than 20% of companies have ambitions to deliver global services from a single location. The model most likely to be embraced is to implement […]
A recent PeercastTM featured a $5B manufacturing company with global operations and over 10,000 employees. While they have a global Shared Services organization in place, there remain challenges to standardizing processes due, in part, to systems differences. While SAP is used globally, there are three SAP instances, with one for the US, a second for […]