Best practices in Shared Services Centers

Shared Services Centers, a complementary path to outsourcing

Article

Christine Stanowski, Vice President of Global Consulting, ADP, discusses how Shared Services Centers and outsourcing work in tandem in order to optimize payroll systems.

Companies often weigh the pros and cons of Shared Services Centers (SSCs) and outsourcing as alternatives to in-house operations.

By choosing to outsource the company’s non-core processes and boosting or reassigning resources to activities with a high added-value, Human Resources (HR) managers optimize their teams’ potential and fulfill their primary duty of using the company’s human capital to their best advantage.

A multinational deploys a project to optimize multi-country payroll function on a Shared Services Center to reach these four objectives: support growth, allocate human capital to enhance performance, reduce technological risks, and meet legal compliance and governance requirements.

Local requirements are critical for accurate payroll processing. Their complexity makes it a challenge for multinationals to run one worldwide payroll system in-house.

The Shared Services Center has two essential roles: restructure retained processes and act as the interface between the company and its service provider.

To sum up, a project to create or extend a Shared Services Center in the context of global payroll outsourcing is multi-faceted. The company must anticipate the challenges it will face as it advances toward the target organization.