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Designing a Service Center
SOURCING MODELS: SHARE SERVICES/ CAPTIVES / DESIGNING A SHARED SERVICE CENTER
Centers of Excellence as the Model. Shared service centers reflect the centralization of certain business processes across multiple jurisdictions, multiple affiliated customers and multiple legal systems. Many shared service centers began their lives as local and regional service centers. To avoid duplication, accelerate delivery, improve transparency, reduce waste and improve expertise, a shared service center begins with standardization of workflows. By then adopting measures to make the shared service center a “center of excellence” (“COE”), the global business organization can achieve shareholder value.
Steps to Organizational Excellence. A service delivery center can be evaluated based on its organizational maturity under the Carnegie-Mellon “Capability Maturity Model.”
Reaching Maturity. In the initial phase, the shared service center simply does the jobs assigned to it. In the repeatable and defined phases, the shared service center team looks at their tasks as workflows and defines the process for performance and for improved efficiency. As the center takes the leap towards the “managed” and “optimized” phases, the members of the team, management and internal users must collaborate to develop, communicate and refine competencies in the workflows. Such communications necessarily involve customer inputs, sometimes referred to as the “voice of the customer” and “user requirements.” As the shared service center matures, job descriptions become well defined to meet well-defined workflows, and career paths can reflect growth in skills within each workflow as well as management of others in that workflow.
Designing a Shared Service Center. Business organizations can achieve significant improvements by adopting the “capability maturity model” for designing, improving and propagating workflows across the extended enterprise. Key questions to answer include:
Legal Issues. While most decisions involving the design and implementation of a shared service center will be business judgments by management, a number of key legal issues arise in considering shared service centers as a tool for corporate organization. Legal department planning should address issues relating to employment, taxation, data protection, exportation of services, anti-bribery controls, accounting, audit, finance, export and import controls for IT equipment and software and services and the availability of promotional incentives for foreign direct investment.
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