Shared Services Centers are growing up and branching out. Beyond driving operational efficiency and cost reduction efforts, they are growing their remit, innovating, and delivering better quality service. Shared Services Centers could well be in their expansion era.
The SSON 2025 Global Market Report results come at a time when Shared Services Centers are navigating difficult terrain. Economic uncertainty, from fluctuating interest rates to inflation, refuses to ease. Heady technological possibilities – most notably GenAI’s rise – are plentiful but often puzzling.
Closer to home, leadership moves, internal resistance, and organizational change like mergers and acquisitions can all put at risk Shared Services Centers’ success. The need for greater efficiency in the face of all this is undeniable. And the role of Shared Services Centers in achieving it is crucial. All that may sound daunting, but here’s the upside: the business needs Shared Services Centers and the skills of the people working in them. We are in the right place at an important time.
However, attempts to optimize processes, improve operational efficiency, and achieve continuous improvement will only succeed if there’s a shared understanding of how the business runs. How it really runs. Right now there’s a disconnect at the heart of most businesses: departments are speaking their own languages, systems aren’t playing nicely together, opaque processes are resistant to change.
The fallout? Shared Services Centers get stuck working at arm’s length from the business, making it difficult to do the essentials like reducing costs, improving service levels, and nailing compliance – let alone take the lead on what’s to come. All that puts Shared Services Centers at risk of being seen as simply a cost-cutting function rather than the more accurate view as a strategic business partner. It’s a ‘volatile and increasingly digital business landscape’, as this report’s introduction rightly highlights.
In response, Shared Services Centers must focus on end-to-end process visibility and assess AI’s role in transforming the operating model, not just automating tasks. Only by gaining visibility over how processes run, can you make them work. Only by understanding your processes can you connect them, your teams, and technologies like AI to your business.
At Celonis we see that understanding – and the opportunities for process improvement it creates – lead to customers saving millions of dollars, freeing up many weeks of time a year, and allowing teams to focus on strategic insights and value-added activities that will shape the next chapter of the shared services model.
It’s reassuring to see these survey results reflect the continued ambition of Shared Services Centers to shine. The focus now must be turning that ambition into practical results. Encouragingly, the right combination of people, processes, and technology remains the most effective approach, according to the survey.
While not novel, this pairing is what delivers meaningful process improvements. Equip skilled people with the right tools, and you unlock efficiency through, for instance, digital twins that reveal business operations as they truly are, smart automation that removes the need for costly manual interventions, and smart AI agents that could propel us into a new era of productivity.
Since operational efficiency and cost reduction are at the core of why Shared Services Centers exist, making processes work has to be at the core of what they do. Process optimization rightly remains a cornerstone of the shared services agenda. Turning that optimization into continuous improvement and efficiency gains demands one thing: real process understanding. So, ask yourself, how well do you really know your business?