Driving High Performance Through Fully Realized Shared Services

It must emphasize collaboration, with shared responsibility for both client satisfaction and end results.

In the 1990s, when many organizations consolidated their back-office processing into a single corporate center, the input from operating units was limited. This meant centralized organizations tended to suffer from process exceptions, ineffective service management and ultimately customer dissatisfaction.

The management shortfalls were evident in:

• Limited dialogue and collaboration.
  
  
• A mismatch between service expectations and service delivery.
  
  
• Under service in some critical areas and over service in areas not highly valued.
  
  
• Customers having little understanding of what they were paying for.
  
  
• Increased costs.
  
  

Simply put, customers were not treated as partners in a service with joint responsibility for success.

Accenture research shows that, in order to support high performance, shared services organizations should focus on establishing a "commercial" relationship with their customers through defined service management frameworks and customer interaction processes.

There are key differences in the perspectives and attributes of a shared services model and simple centralization. Governance in a traditionally centralized organization is entirely from headquarters, the primary objective is cost control, and customers are treated as end users, with ad-hoc management of customer contact. In contrast, the shared services model views customers as clients, and service responsibility is shared between the shared services center and clients—clients include operating units, employees, end customers and vendors.

In Accenture's experience there are many "value levers" that contribute to the cost management, service enhancement and strategic value of shared service models. While the contribution of centralization and standardization is clear, it is the additional levers—focusing on the "commercial" relationship, through service level agreements, transparency and partnership building—that extend centralization to true shared services.

By completing the transition to a true shared services model, centralized organizations suffering from suboptimal cost and service performance can increase shared accountability for outcomes and reduce end-to-end processing costs, thus improving customer satisfaction and leading to high performance.

The transition from centralization to shared services should include four initiatives:

• Enhance customer focus: Provide separate services to operating units from those provided to the "Corporate Center" and external entities.
  
  
• Create a supplier-buyer relationship: Develop a formal "commercial" relationship between the operating units and the shared services organization.
  
  
• Increase transparency for services and costs: Define services, service levels, responsibilities and costs.
  
  
• Establish end-to-end accountability process performance: Manage and measure processes on an end-to-end basis.