Guide to Shared Services

Stewart Miller writes:

Shared Service Centres (SSCs) are becoming an increasingly common way of delivering HR services to organisations. Several factors are driving this growth:

• By centralising business processes delivery into one (or a few) locations, the HR function can improve its efficiency and build on economies of scale, while improving the quality of service provided.
• As technology such as employee self-service continues to change the way companies operate, it is possible to deliver services across geographically dispersed operations. A Shared Service Centre takes advantage of this technology and removes the constraints of location and time zones.
• Shared Services is a way of driving a step change in the way that the HR function is structured and how services are delivered. Shared services is not necessarily the same as centralisation – in fact, it is possible to create a shared services model based on multiple locations. Likewise, shared services is not the same as outsourcing, although it may include some services that are performed by a third party (see also the NGA Human Resources HR Guide to Outsourcing).

There are two distinctive features of HR shared service centres:

• They are based on a common, i.e. shared service provision of routine HR administration
• They are service-focused, enabling the customers of the shared service to specify the level and nature of the service.

Click here to read the full paper: http://bit.ly/1rq7Jl6