Technology support for Shared Services

It is often the case that the creation of a Shared Service organization coexists with the implementation or upgrade of an ERP package.  As the thinking goes, there must be an integrated and cohesive technology architecture before we can obtain value from a Shared Service Center.  While it would be ideal to have a single ERP system for the SSC and the business units it supports, it isn't absolutely necessary and a company could lose the benefits of moving to an SSC while it waits to implement a single system.

Deciding on the number of systems a Shared Service Center can and should accommodate will be different for every company.  It's clear that companies that have high performance focus on a single instance of a global ERP.  And yet a company with three or four different systems, or instances of the same ERP could still make the leap to Shared Services using the existing technology.  By doing so, they'll reap the benefits of scale and, to some extent, process standardization.  There are also intangible benefits such as better recruitment and retention of talent within the Center.

The real challenge comes when there are large disparities in the systems of the various business units.  This typically occurs over time when a company has grown through acquisition, but they didn't make the investment to move each business over to a common system in the period after the acquisition.  If a company finds itself in this situation, it could easily make sense to wait to launch a Shared Service Center until there is a merging of the existing technologies.