Shared services center

A shared services center – a center for shared services in an organization – is the entity responsible for the execution and the handling of specific operational tasks, such as accounting, human resources, payroll, IT, legal, compliance, purchasing, security. The shared services center is often a spin-off of the corporate services to separate all operational type of tasks from the corporate headquarters, which has to focus on a leadership and corporate governance type of role. As shared services centers are often cost centers, they are quite cost-sensitive also in terms of their headcount, labour costs and location selection criteria.

A shared service is an accountable entity within a multi-unit organization tasked with supplying the business unit, respective divisions and departments with specialized services (finance, HR transactions, IT services, facilities, logistics, sales transactions) on the basis of a service level agreement (SLA) with a costs charge out on basis of some type and system of transfer price.

Shared service centers are deployed for a variety of reasons:

Reported cost reductions of costs of services organized in shared service center are as high as 70% of the original costs, but average about 50%.

Shared service centers are not to be confused with corporate staff departments. Different from staff departments, shared service centers have measurable outputs (by quantity and quality), with costs per unit of service provided. Tasks not organized in shared service centers include corporate control, corporate legal, management development policy, IT-governance and other support typical for the statutory duties of the executive board.

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