How to Turn a Shared Services Center into a Value Magnet

Now Shared Services Centers are being leant on more than ever. Inflation, labor shortages, geopolitical turmoil and a whole host of other industry and sector specific issues have combined to create a perfect storm of economic uncertainty. Businesses wanting to stay dry need their Shared Services Centers to cut cost and create value seamlessly everyday.

That creates a lot of pressure. But here’s the silver lining: with all eyes on them, Shared Services Centers have the chance to become the heroes the business needs.

Shared Services Centers need technology to cut cost effectively

Problem is, the typical ways Shared Services Centers cut costs are too resource heavy to match the current reality. Consultants and Centers of Excellence may get the job part way done with process mapping, but it’s far from total and objective. Offshoring can end up creating cost reductions, but quality outcomes cannot be guaranteed.

Shared Services Centers that want to be a strategic business partner (and get to wear the hero’s cape) need to take less typical approaches. They need to become a truly digital shared services function that throws technology, not people, at what is fundamentally a process problem.

Top process mining priorities for Shared Services Centers

Before getting to that technology (spoiler alert: it’s process mining) let’s take a look at what’s happening in Shared Services Centers at the moment.

Shared Services Centers are responsible for business critical processes. According to the SSON the top three process priorities for SSCs are Purchase-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Record-to-Report.

• Download our free infographic on the SSON global findings here

Leaders know the importance of getting processes right: 87% say end-to-end process integration is a priority. However, only 29% say their end-to-end process management maturity is advanced. That gap signals where cost improvement opportunities are going missed. Constantly.

And as companies grow, their processes get more complicated. So processes built to look like the NYC subway map start morphing into the work of an abstract expressionist. The result: Shared Services Centers missing out on almost endless ways to create value for the business. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Process mining use cases for Shared Services Centers

Time to talk tech. Shared Services Centers can only do so much without the right solution. But by layering process mining over their existing tools and systems, Shared Services Centers can:

• See how their processes actually run
• Find the hidden pockets of untapped opportunity (millions of them)
• And extract that value, all of it

Process mining from Celonis provides unparalleled visibility into how processes run – think of it like an MRI over a business. With that MRI, leaders can level up their work and take heroic action like:

• Boosting the touchless invoice rate in Accounts Payable by detecting data discrepancies in the purchase order and the invoice
• Accelerating touchless collections in Accounts Receivable by automating previously manual steps such as dunning outreach and credit approvals
• Increasing on-time delivery in Order Management by using machine learning to predict which customers are most likely to pay on time and then skipping credit checks
• Avoiding contract leakage in Procurement by spotting purchase requisitions without contracts and automatically applying the appropriate contract

Read how Deutsche Telekom’s Shared Services Center saved over €66M with Celonis.