Shared options
Capgemini Shared Services Vice President Cliff Evans provides expert advice on how organisations can get the best out of a move to shared services delivery.
16 November 2006
Publication
For the back office, shared services can certainly deliver efficiency and greater quality of data, but you must have the right spend scope as a business, and the right mindset to get the value out of implementing them.
In other parts of the business, such as packaging or marketing, one strives for different values from shared services, which could include better customer response, more improved responsiveness or even compliance. So it’s not a panacea. But in the right environment - and with the right motivation — it can certainly deliver substantial benefits.
It’s not something you approach lightly; it’s something you have to stick out and keep going along the journey. Shared services people set out - and I think there is a particular danger of this in the public sector - thinking that shared service is a magic bullet to suddenly get the cost saving. What they then find is that, as they set out on the journey and have done their benchmarks, management comes in and also runs some benchmarks, and they work out that the finance function in total is 30% off what might be classed as a best-in class cost base. Then they think the magic bullet is to put it into a shared service. But, actually, they miss the point.
An awful lot of the cost of what they put in the shared service then sits in what is left of the finance function.
If they don’t then transform the rest of the finance function, they will look back in a couple of years and find out that they have got reasonably efficient shared service, but that actually the total cost has not gone down because they simply haven’t addressed the whole problem.
