Shared Services
Efficient, productive and value-add shared services
Shared Services is the model for how to create efficiency and productivity improvements within an organization. However, many shared services groups struggle to fully realize the promised benefits of the model due to challenges from alignment of resources around key goals to misunderstanding complexity of the tasks at hand. We help these groups analyze the issues they are facing and implement plans to add value in areas such as:
- Payroll and employee services, human resources (HR)
- Finance and related activities
- Facilities management
- Information technology (IT)
Optimizing a shared services organization requires careful understanding of the organization’s readiness to accept change. Because shared services are so deeply intertwined in the company structure, careful planning must be done to ensure changes are effective and accepted by the entire organization.
Experience
We begin with a careful review, during which time we strive to understand how the organization operates and find opportunities for improvement. Some areas we may analyze include:
Facilities Management – physical space, lease arrangements and capacity utilization
- Review of current lease space holdings and facility rationalization studies
- Market assessments
- Understanding capacity utilization
- Analysis of maintenance and operational costs
- Review of Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) with business units
- Alternative Cost analysis
Finance and related services
- Analysis of Organizational Structure and Design in the financial departments with attention to spans of control and reporting responsibilities
- Utilization of current systems in order to expedite routine reporting and month end close
- Analysis of duplicate or redundant systems or procedures that have been put in place for exceptions rather than normal operating procedures
- Lean office assessment
Accounts Payable
- Evaluation of current processes and review of policies and procedures
- Analysis of quality control
- Understanding impact of business unit behavior on AP processing quality
- Analysis of activity and labor productivity/rationalization
- Analysis of backlog and problem resolution
- Assessment of key performance indicators (KPI’s)
Information Technology (IT) Help Desk and Site Support
- Evaluation of site criteria: is the Help Desk organized properly to meet the worldwide need?
- Rationalization of Outsource versus In-house
- Service level measurement
Results
“The work you have done has put us in a great position to expand the footprint of Shared Services”
- Global Head of Shared Services
For a recent project in a payroll and employee services group, results include:
- Developed and implemented a new set of comprehensive metrics that accurately reflected the workload
- Improved SLA performance by 16% in the first month of new reporting
- Reduced Past Dues by over 80%
- Reduced dropped calls by over 60%
