Type Or Structure Of Shared Service Centre

CLICK TO THE MAIN PAGE FOR ALL ARTICLES ON SHARED SERVICE CENTRE

Different types or structures of shared service centre

There are a few ways whereby multinational companies restructure to accommodate sharing of financial or other services:

By setting up a SINGLE centre for all operating units

This is the most ambitious option as it involves sharing services globally across the entire corporation. On one side of the coin, this structure allows the greatest scope to exploit economies of scale but on the other hand this shared service centre should be capable of handling global tax and regulatory issues. To define skill sets of the shared service centre staff is quite complex.

By setting up a centre for EACH GEOGRAPHIC REGION

Unlike the above option, this is an intermediate or achievable option as this SSC only serves its operating units within their own region. Each designs processes in line with local requirements, addresses regional tax and regulatory issues and only accommodates culture and language diversity with relative ease.

By setting up a centre for EACH PROCESS OR COMBINATION OF RELATED PROCESSES.

This type of SSC encourage the development of functional specialists and is at the expense of full integration unlike the above-mentioned options. Maybe, one centre is stationed in Thailand to handle Accounts Receivable and Collection, another country for Accounts Payable and Payment and again another for Payroll processing and etc.
Incidentally, there is no best practice model exists.

The choice of the structure of SSC depends on the company’s circumstances, its overall business and marketing strategies and the nature of any other enterprise-wide initiatives. Some companies might set up a regional or geographic region and then merged into one global region.