Delivering a true partnership across process value lines is key to demonstrating real value to the organizations

by Michael J. Steer, Papinda Bhandal

For many, the journey to delivering a successful shared service center (SSC) ends once it is delivering agreed service levels at a lower cost. But many organizations are realizing this is not enough. To be truly successful the SSC must continually demonstrate real value to the organization and be seen as a key element in delivering the strategic vision.

How does the SSC shift from being a service provider to a business partner? Working as a business partner involves more than doing the same things faster and at a lower cost. It also means adding value by taking what was done before and doing it better and possibly even differently.

To deliver real performance improvements it is necessary to take a holistic view, reviewing the business and the underlying processes from an end-to-end perspective. This ensures that all potential failure points are properly identified and the impact of any breakdown is both transparent and fully understood throughout. A process should be built in such a way that items are fixed as they move through and dealt with at the original point of failure rather than retrospectively at a later point. This is where the real challenge and issue lies for a shared service center.

While an SSC may have adopted a service culture and introduced continuous improvement programs to drive efficiency and effectiveness, these initiatives are likely to have been performed only within the SSC’s sphere of control—within the “walls” of the service center. Once the process moves outside those walls the responsibility and accountability for performance usually reside with others. To achieve real and enduring change, shared services leaders need to break down the walls and move outside their immediate area of control.

How does the SSC break down the barriers to deliver true value across the end-to-end process line? The most important step is for the SSC to become an integral part of decision-making and delivery of the strategic vision. The SSC should build on its successes to date and step forward, insisting on establishing joint teams—a partnership between the center and client organization. These teams can identify and implement enterprise wide process improvements from start to finish within each process line.

The SSC should demand fixes to the root causes of problems that manifest themselves at the end of the process rather than being the hero and fixing everything that gets thrown at it.

The SSC leadership team also needs to be seen as evangelists of change and improvement—challenging the status quo and driving the business forward as a partner rather than as a provider.

Working in partnership means both the SSC and client can review and improve the end-to-end process. The restrictions and politics of areas of control and who has delivered each of the benefits need to be swept away and replaced with an enterprise-wide view.

This can be achieved in a number of ways:
Partnership: Implementing a partnership model which, while effective in driving and implementing change, can be slow as it requires joint agreement on prioritisations as well as consensus on the changes that should be made.
Global process owners: An alternative option that organizations should consider is the establishment of global process owners for each of the process value lines. This requires a complete mindset change around the operation of the business but can provide the following benefits:
• A faster decision making environment for continuous improvement;
• Establishment of a flexible organizational structure to support the end-to-end flow of information and data; and
• Enablement of the appropriate technology solutions to support the end-to-end process, delivering significant automation and efficiency.
By exploring these options, organizations are in
effect ripping up the rule book on current organizational design and shared service strategy and posing several interesting questions such as:
• Where in the organization should the global process owner sit?
• Who should the global process owner report to?
• Will the implementation of such a model ultimately result in the amalgamation of the SSC back into the business?

The SSC can always do more. Shared services leaders must aspire to deliver real business value and improved satisfaction across the enterprise using end-to-end process lines. The least an SSC can do is to help break down the walls between the front-line business and the support functions to ensure the organization works as one cohesive unit.