Financial Shared Services

Financial Shared Services, a new report from Business Intelligence, is your definitive guide to creating a customer-centric finance shared services organization (SSO). Based on in-depth analyses of eight corporations, who collectively work out of shared services centres throughout the world, this report shows that leading SSOs are migrating from a primarily cost saving focus in value creation to becoming truly customer-centric stand-alone business units.

The experiences of a number of other SSOs, the input of expert consultants and advisors, an examination of other major research reports, plus the results of a specially commissioned survey of SSO practitioners adds to the knowledge and learning from our major case organizations. Furthermore, each chapter within the report concludes with a self-assessment checklist to assist you in gauging your organization's preparedness in creating and implementing an SSO.

This management report features:

  • How to create a customer-centric Finance SSO.
  • How to dramatically improve compliance management.
  • How to take shared services to new levels of effectiveness and efficiency self-assessment checklists to help you plan the creation of a service-focused Finance SSO.
  • The key building blocks of a Financial Shared Services Organization (SSO).
  • In-depth case studies from leading international organizations including FedEx, NHS and Reuters.

Financial Shared Services also provides you with an action template and twenty key questions which capture the learnings of the report. Answering these questions will put you in a good position to elevate your SSO to its next evolutionary level.

Finance departments who have got it right found that that an FSSO helped to achieve the company's strategic goals, and have delivered a whole range of benefits to the organization including:

  1. Higher quality services
  2. Dramatic and sustained savings in operating costs of up to 45%
  3. Increased customer satisfaction
  4. Streamlining and simplification of processes
  5. More reliable service delivery through automation
  6. Easier and more effective compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley
  7. An improved strategic focus - more time for finance to focus on added-value services.

Financial Shared Services provides a definitive blueprint on how to plan and scope FSSOs to generate the greatest reward for the organization in terms of higher quality services as well as lower costs. It also explains what the main challenges are and how to overcome them with examples from companies that have tackled and resolved common problems ranging from culture change and location selection to charge back and staff retention issues.

Additional Information

Find answers to these 20 key questions:

  1. Is it better to locate a shared services operation close to existing corporate centres or in a Greenfield site?
  2. How can shared services improve the management of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory?
  3. Is there always a clear advantage in charging for shared services?
  4. Should business units be free to purchase services from outside suppliers?
  5. Who should be involved in managing a shared services operation?
  6. Are service level agreements the only way to manage SSOs?
  7. Are shared services ever a better bet than outsourcing or insourcing?
  8. What kind of qualifications and competencies do financial shared service operators need to possess?
  9. Which geographical locations provide the best options?
  10. Why is it dangerous to put cost savings ahead of service improvement?
  11. Are financial transaction processes the only candidates for a shared services operation?
  12. Should you plan for one global shared services centre or multiple sites?
  13. What is the most effective way of gaining buy-in from business unit and other managers?
  14. How can a customer service culture be developed?
  15. Why is it so important to segment customers of financial shared services?
  16. How should customers be involved in the ongoing management of the SSO?
  17. What are the most appropriate measures for tracking SSO performance?
  18. How can appraisal and incentive systems be used to reinforce customer-focused behaviour?
  19. How can benchmarking against external organizations be used to spur performance improvement?
  20. Is it more effective to retrain existing staff or bring in new staff?

Posted on 16/10/08