back to the
main page
Top Five Reasons Shared Services Make Sense in Tough Economic Times
In the face of a global economic slowdown, the implementation of shared services is an obvious choice for businesses focused on cutting expenditures. But shared services does more than save money—it readies businesses to gain maximum competitive advantage both now and once the economy rebounds.
Shared services involve the centralized delivery of back-office business services previously dispersed across multiple business units, including HR, payroll, IT, finance, accounting and procurement. But, in fact, cost-cutting is only part of the story. Here are the top five reasons to pursue a shared services strategy.
- Cut operating costs
When you consolidate and rationalize services across business units, you eliminate back-office duplication and drive down costs per transaction by maintaining a focused, highly efficient team.
To drive further efficiency, the shared services operation can run like a business, where the business units are customers that must be served and satisfied. In this way, shared services operations become accountable to contribute bottom line results.
- Get better insight faster
In a volatile economy in which conditions are changing at lightning speed, timely insight is more valuable than ever. It's what can turn a crisis into an opportunity.
When you standardize business services, you also improve business insight. Why? Because by following a single set of business processes, metrics too are rationalized. Suddenly you're comparing apples and apples instead of apples and oranges. And you get data faster by eliminating the need to roll up results from multiple organizations.
-
Keep business units focused on profit-making activities
You want your top managers and executives in your market-facing business units to focus on making smart, forward-thinking business decisions, rather than trying to provide administrative services. By unburdening business units of back-office functions, you free them up to concentrate on their markets, products, and most profitable customers.
- Support strategic initiatives
By streamlining and consolidating back-office functions, businesses create the flexibility and responsiveness to undertake major strategic initiatives, such as acquisitions, divestitures, and reorganizations. A shared services environment simplifies and accelerates the ability to extend services to newly acquired or reconstituted organizations.
- Speed time-to-value
The initial adoption of the shared services model requires thoughtful planning and careful execution. However, once disparate business functions and systems have been consolidated, you can dramatically speed deployment of new applications and services—and speed time-to-value in the process.
Oracle On Demand is a sponsor of the 13th annual Shared Services Week, March 22-27, in Orlando, Florida. Learn more about this event.
back to the top
|
