The Direction for North American Shared Services? Upbeat and Value-driven

The panel of speakers on our webinar yesterday couldn't have been better placed to discuss the future direction for finance shared services and outsourcing in North America. Their pace and energy was matched by the audience's contributions to poll questions that made this one of our most upbeat and knowledge-packed sessions this year.

Deborah Kops from Sourcing Change, Mary Driscoll at APQC, and Henry Ijams, PayStream Advisors, gave their perspectives on current trends, opportunities and next steps for organisations transforming their finance functions.

To stay relevant, Deborah stressed the importance of scale for shared services. "It's mandatory to evolve the business model to achieve maximum benefit for stakeholders," she said. Participants echoed this message in a related poll. Expanding the scope of their shared services' functions was the top challenge for 66% of respondents.



Deborah's second insight was that companies no longer have to make black-and-white centralisation decisions. "It's not an either/or between finance shared services or outsourcing," she said. Hybrid models provide flexibility and should incorporate onsourcing - establishing centres within the US. And regardless of the approach she recommended treating SSCs as a company within a company with its own financial, sourcing, operating, sales and marketing skills.

The evolution for finance shared services

A long-term commentator on the field of financial processes, Mary Driscoll shared the results of a recent APQC survey. The research found that the top-five goals for finance SSC evolution included:

1. Proper mix of BI and efficiency


2. Annual productivity


3. Continuous improvement


4. SSC decision support


5. SSC and strategy

 

APQC found that the evolution of finance shared services moves from cost reduction to increasing value, something reflected in many of our recent conversations with end users. Mary concluded with a strong message: "The pursuit of productivity never ends."

Mobile is a must

Following the productivity theme, Henry Ijams looked at the progress made by companies as they have pushed for automation throughout their finance processes. He drove home the message that email is not an effective way to deliver workflow. "We need to go mobile to achieve touchless processing," he said as he gave impressive statistics on the adoption surge for smartphones and other mobile devices.

One of our final polls told us that improving service delivery is the top objective for companies this year with cost reduction a close second. We're exploring these topics and much more at our North American finance shared services and outsourcing summit this October in Dallas. We've just released the draft programme and have chunky discounts available if you're quick. We're looking forward to a similar energetic vibe in Texas - we hope you will join us.