Shared Services Centres: A Game Changer for Companies

Shared Services Centres: A Game Changer for Companies

Within an organisation, a shared services centre (SSC) is an entity that coordinates and manages various business operations. Finance, accounting, purchasing, IT, and human resources are some of these operations.

The following points explain why this approach is transformative for businesses:

Improvement in efficiency

Businesses can make processes more efficient by giving various tasks to one business unit. This suggests that a shared service centre can complete tasks more efficiently and with fewer resources than a large number of departments.

Results in economies of scale

Shared Service Centres (SSCs) generate economies of scale for the following reasons:

●Standardised processes: By centralising functions and standardising processes across different business units, SSC can eliminate redundancies, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

●Volume discounts: SSC often handles a higher volume of work than individual departments, which can enable them to negotiate better deals with suppliers and vendors. By leveraging their purchasing power, it can secure volume discounts and pass on these savings to the organisation.

Better communication 

Collaboration across various departments in your company can be challenging. You can promote team collaboration by combining non-core operations into a shared services centre. Due to this reason, team members will find it easier to communicate and collaborate.

These are some reasons that made SSC a game changer for various businesses.

How can you implement a successful shared services model?

Having understood the benefits of SSCs, let's explore how to implement this model effectively. Consider these key strategies:

1. Objective clarity
   Selecting the particular task or procedure that needs to be managed by the SSC is crucial. Generally, these tasks will include IT, finance, human resources, other administrative duties, etc. For instance, if you want SSC to manage your finance-related tasks, then you can take advantage of the financial shared service centre.

2. Process alignment
   Process alignment is an essential component in moving to a shared services model’s paradigm. Start by assessing the current procedures being used by various departments in your company. Look for best practices and standardised analogies. The objective of all this is to eliminate any kind of inefficiency and provide consistency by developing a standard set of practices that will be applied throughout the whole organisation.

3. Establish the organisational structure.
   Create roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines inside the centralised unit. Effective change management strategies are necessary to address any problems and ensure a smooth transition. All of this will help in establishing the reliable organisational framework for the shared services model.

4. Qualified team
   To achieve the best results, SSC must be operated by a team of highly qualified individuals that have knowledge about the knowledge of various business operations. Thus, ensuring that the SSC team that you have assigned has all these qualities.

5. Excellent leadership
   Having capable leaders who can manage operations is really important. They can handle everyday problems and improve operations over time. Thus, ensuring exceptional leadership is beneficial.

6. Utilise technology
   The feasibility of the shared services concept depends on technology. Determine if the existing systems can manage the additional, centralised functions. Examine and choose software options that complement your shared services' objectives. This might include merging existing systems or putting new solutions into place that can support the centralised processes.

Challenges during implementing this model

After learning about its benefits and how to implement this model, it is important that you know about the challenges that might come during its implementation:

Matching goals and expectations

A primary challenge when setting up an SSC is aligning the objectives and expectations of various stakeholders within your organisation. Different team members may harbour diverse perspectives, interests, and apprehensions regarding the SSC initiative. These concerns might range from perceived threats to job security to fears of diminished autonomy. Addressing these varied viewpoints is crucial for smooth implementation and widespread acceptance of the new shared services model.

Balancing of standardisation

Standardising shared tasks or procedures throughout the company is a major advantage of an SSC. But it can also lead to problems, such as making the SSC less responsive and flexible to the unique requirements and tastes of the business units or clients.

Maintaining security and compliance

Ensuring the security and compliance of the confidential information handled by an SSC is crucial. While handling this information, SSC might face security threats such as cyberattacks, fraud, theft, etc.

The implementation of strategies that are mentioned above in this blog may face significant hurdles due to these challenges. However, the approach of selecting appropriate software can be highly effective, provided the chosen solution is robust and dependable. This is crucial because overseeing business operations is inherently complex, and there are ever-present security risks such as cyber threats to contend with. A reliable software solution can help mitigate these concerns while streamlining the implementation process.

Mynd Integrated Solutions is one such platform that provides the best  shared services model. As its shared service centre can handle operational tasks and transactional issues in the accounting and finance sector by using automation and other technologies.

You can find it by searching shared service centre finance and accounting.

Conclusion

SSC has become a reliable solution for several businesses. This is because it can effectively oversee and improve a variety of corporate operations. By considering the aforementioned strategies, it can be successfully implemented. However, to avoid challenges like managing expectations of various stakeholders or maintaining security protocols, etc., it will be smart to use Mynd’s shared service centre that has cutting-edge technologies. Through its shared service centre, Mynd Integrated Solutions has been assisting businesses efficiently with shared service finance and accounting, while managing their operations.