After the Go-Live: Ten focus areas for effective Shared Service delivery - Part 7 - Evaluate Additional Processes to Shift to the Shared Service Organization

Once the Shared Service Organization is up and running, the governance committees responsible for oversight should regularly be engaged in identifying additional processes and activities that could be moved into the Shared Service Organization.  There are several different angles a company could take as they work to leverage the existing shared service infrastructure to drive additional value.

1. Expand the number of Finance activities.  Typically a company moving to Shared Services will take a relatively low risk (read: far away from the Customer) process and migrate it to a SSO.  Many times companies start with Accounts Payable or expense reimbursement.  Not that these aren't important activities, but they tend to be lower risk than other choices a company has.  As a company becomes more comfortable with "outsourcing" these activities from the Business Units to the SSO, they start to look at other processes such as general ledger accounting, management reporting, customer invoicing and cash applications.  Still others further along the curve are looking at budgeting, variance reporting, product costing and profitability, and customer profitability.  There is no single "right" choice for every company.  It depends on a number of factors including the complexity of the product or service, diversity in the lines of business, geographic dispersion and corporate culture.  The point is that leading companies are always looking for additional processes to migrate.  And they start with the assumption that the process could be migrated and then look at why it might not be wise to do so.  The burden of proof is on those who believe it should stay locally in the Business Unit.
2. Bring additional Business Units, Regions or Countries into the fold.  For a variety of reasons it may make sense to start with one business unit to stand up the SSO and then migrate additional business units.  Many companies take a regional perspective.  I worked on one client, a U.S.-based multi-national, who started with their North American operations, moved to Asia to consolidate a number of back-office processes in that region, and then moved to Europe to consolidate there.  The roll-out strategy will need to be developed as part of the overall approach, and will be heavily guided by the potential cost savings as documented in the business case.
3. Migrate non-Finance processes.  Even though this is a Finance blog, the reality is that many companies have moved beyond the single function SSO and are leveraging their existing infrastructure to drive additional value.  IT and HR are two common functions, but companies are moving beyond that to look at Procurement, Customer Service, Facilities Management, Logistics and more.  As a company moves further away from the traditional functions of Finance, IT and HR, they can expect more and more push back from the Business Units.  They'll tell you that they're unique and that those processes can't possibly be moved to an SSO.  The reality, however, is that there are companies today doing just that.

The Steering Committee that has overall governance oversight is ultimately responsible for driving additional value.  However, they'll depend on the Process Councils as well as other interested stakeholder groups to identify processes that are logical candidates for the move to Shared Services.