Best practices in Shared Services Centers

Reasons to set up a Shared Services Center

Video

Andrew Kris, Consultant Director of Borderless Executive Search, enumerates reasons and importance of setting up a Shared Services Center.

Shared Services means building a business—a business that delivers services inside the organization—with cost, quality and timeliness that are competitive with the alternative ways of doing the same thing. People who have thought about Shared Services as an internal business have been the most successful. And, maintaining that model applies to everything you do in your Shared Services Center.

Efficiency and effectiveness are the compelling reasons for providing service internally, a service that is created as a business.

There is another really good reason why many companies turn to Shared Services: fast track expansion through acquisition.

In most companies, consolidating, replicating a service across an organization is almost a cyclical activity. Consolidation consisting of centralization and decentralization is just a recurring activity. It’s a flow of activity and control from the center to the outside, to the countries or to the business units, and all the way back again. That is a wonderful thing to do, but that is absolutely not Shared Services.