Shared Services : Overview and Commercial Structures

Shared Services is consolidation and centralization of service processes of an organization. It combines advantages of an external service and internal staff. In Shared Services, the processes in different areas of a company or organization are managed by central location or a specified department. The place is usually referred to as shared service center (SSC). The departments, which take the services is in a kind of customer relationship with the SSC.

Overview of Shared Services

Unlike the outsourcing in Shared Services the external service provider with a service that is in the shared services structure similar to internal outsourcing. This should combine the advantages of an external service and internal staff.

Important principles of Shared Services are :

• Follow up
• Management
• Customer orientation
• Benchmarking
• Process orientation and standardization
• Process Monitoring

The implementation of shared services is to support processes, they are not bound geographically and have a sufficiently large potential for standardization.

Commercial Structures, Advantages and Disadvantages of Shared Services

Shared Services is especially important for processes provisioning human resources (HR) in limited in the financial sector and the internal IT structure like help desk. The commonest example of Shared Services is the call centers which provides help over the phone.

Advantages of Shared Services are quite straightforward – it simply reduces the cost and burden of a small to medium sized company, while making the way smoother to keep it nearly to a self dependent Enterprise. Internal Shared Services is often practiced in health and IT sectors during emergency requirements.

With increasing demand of the usage of Shared Services, the number of various third party companies has been increased too. There is questionable quality of control from a consumer’s point of view for many companies, when  Shared Services are used as Help Desk or over the phone help. With time, Help Desk now universally used by bigger to smaller companies. As the end Shared Services personnel has limited idea of the original product or service, the limitation of using Shared Services in all fields becomes obvious.