Shared Service Centres; benefits, risks, why and when

Anton Charles

Testing

Building Capability in the Finance Department

The value of a corporate finance department that's scalable is that, adding capacity, adding turnover, adding transactions, even acquiring other businesses, isn't directly commensurate with number of people you need to add to support that. If the processes are well designed and the structure is correct, then the size you need to increase your back office to in order to cope with the increased business, is much smaller. It's not just throwing people at a growing business.

Thought Piece: Turnaround

Award winning Finance Journalist, Peter Williams, discusses developments in Turnaround with Peter Charles.

Shared Service Centres; benefits, risks, why and when

Shared Service Centres (SSCs) are one of the key ways forward for large corporations with geographically widespread and diverse businesses. Shared services are a formal method of internal outsourcing where a function – such as accounting – is re-engineered and standardised. SSCs allow business processes to be brought together in a single location to support multiple business entities on a customer-supplier basis. While it might be relatively straightforward to make the strategic decision to create a SSC, actually creating one is a different matter.

How to restructure and take the staff with you

Invariably the path to organisational success is underpinned by a partnership with its people but there's no standard or fixed HR solution to this. HR needs to be commercial and must evolve according to business objectives. Award winning financial journalist, Peter Williams, finds out more from Julia Van der Mark.