👨🏾‍🤝‍👨🏽 ✊🏿 🚽 How to Automate a Shared Service Center 🧓 👨🏾‍🔬 🕴️

Companies are always striving to reduce the costs of supporting business processes, such as HR, accounting, IT, and procurement. One way is to centralize these processes in a common service center (SSC). SSC is a separate service unit within a company, sometimes a legally separate organization that provides services in the form of outsourcing.

For the formation of SSC there are a number of prerequisites:

the company has branches throughout the country and abroad;
each branch has its own service department, reporting to the head office - maintenance, accounting, personnel selection, etc .;
lack of resources in local units to perform service functions;
lack of qualified specialists in the field.

Among the main advantages of SSCs are the reduction of time to market, saving on functions transferred to SSCs, increasing the efficiency and quality of business processes, increasing the efficiency of the internal control system, and reducing operating expenses.

In Russia, large state-owned companies were among the first to create SSCs. Russian Railways, Rosatom, Rosneft, Sberbank and other corporations have service centers. However, medium-sized companies are also introducing SSCs now.

Business processes that are transferred to the SSC

According to Deloitte, in the world and in Russia, SSCs most often transfer financial transactions, HR, IT, procurement, customer support, and tax and accounting reporting. Gradually, the sales and marketing, real estate and premises management departments also begin to transfer to SSCs. Another trend is the expansion of functionality, when one SSC performs a number of non-core business tasks at the same time.

Like any service unit, the SSC needs effective tools for automating business processes. It can be a single platform or part of a corporate system.

SSC automation in practice

The following elements should be noted as basic elements of SSC automation:

service requests;
incident management;
tracking regulatory deadlines for the execution of applications;
reporting in all possible sections;
availability of a catalog of services;
corporate portal.

Depending on the business goals of the company, processes are configured.

For example, one of our customers, the largest metallurgical company in Russia, needed to automate a number of processes in the SSC to support production needs. A complex coordination procedure was also formalized and introduced, taking into account the business specifics of the client.

We implemented our own standards, requirements for industrial safety, tools for evaluating performance indicators, and many other tasks in working with each project under the SSC.

Thus, our experience shows that a modern automation platform should have a set of tools that provide flexible customization for different conditions and tasks of customers.

3rd party software integration

Companies that automate SSCs already use various tools: ERP, BPM, conference reservation systems, security monitoring systems, etc. All these products must integrate with the new automation platform.

There are a number of “typical compatibility” with well-known products, such as SAP, Oracle, 1C, etc. But often we are faced with the need for more complex integrations with other services that need to be implemented with the help of developers.

Using predefined modules

It is desirable that boxed solutions for various divisions are flexibly tuned to the specifics of a particular unit. For example, the Low Code and No Code development tools facilitate customization of the workflow and are understandable even to non-programmers. Using them, a user with administrator rights can independently add new stages to the processing of applications and incidents, create new types of service and change requests, new types of reports, change approval levels, expanding the functionality of any module.

Omnichannel support

All channels through which service departments communicate with customers, from telephony to the self-service portal, must be combined on one platform. The employee sees the call history and, if necessary, can switch to a more convenient channel. Omnichannel accelerates the processing and execution of requests, increases the level of customer satisfaction.

Detailed analytics

In order to objectively evaluate the work of the SSC and to understand how effective each of the employees is, convenient means of control are needed. For these purposes, reports should be implemented in the platform - with the ability to create new types of reporting for any business process and even a single operation - and dashboards in which various performance indicators are configured and visualized.

Often, for specific client business tasks, we develop custom reporting forms and upload them to the system. However, basic features should always be implemented in a “box”.

Self Service Portal

This is one of the basic tools of the SSC, where employees and customers can independently create applications for services and solve problems by monitoring the status of work. For example, in the SSC, which deals with personnel issues, an employee can submit an electronic application for leave, leave or dismissal through the portal, request a visa certificate, and receive a copy of the work book. The self-service portal, in combination with a single knowledge base, simplifies the interaction of SSC and employees, reduces the load on the service.

The self-service portal is the most important point of contact between the service center and business users. Companies should strive to ensure that as many applications as possible come from the portal, because this significantly reduces the cost of performing routine registration and processing of applications. In order for the portal to be used, it must be convenient and functional.

Tools we use

In our work, we use different automation tools. When choosing a platform, it is worth considering many factors, not only the general requirements for the system, but also, for example, the need to comply with applicable laws. Therefore, we try to choose the best options for each customer individually. We implement many projects on the Russian SimpleOne platform, which we use ourselves.

SimpleOne is a platform for end-to-end business process automation, a single tool for managing company services for internal and external customers. The platform is developed based on the concept of Enterprise Service Management (ESM), taking into account ITIL v. 4, v. 3 and VeriSM.

The platform implements ready-made box solutions for various departments: IT, AXO, HR, financial department, etc. These solutions, like the system itself, can be scaled. For each of the processes, you can set the required level of service (SLA) and monitor its compliance.

Finance and accounting . All necessary financial services are automated: payroll, bonuses, vacation pay and other payments, treasury operations, interaction with counterparties, accounting documents, tax reporting, etc. The

personnel department. The platform offers a ready-made module for the HR service, with the help of which all applications related to personnel matters are fulfilled, from staff selection and training to arranging vacations and business trips.

Customer Support (Contact Center). Using SimpleOne, you can organize the work of the first and second support lines. Applications are processed and routed in a single servicedesk-tool, coming from different channels: e-mail, phone, self-service portal, instant messengers, social networks.

Information Technology. The platform provides for the implementation of best practices for the provision of IT services, taking into account the ITIL 4 methodology. The customer company can automate both IT service services - system administration and technical support - and software development processes: scrum tools and a convenient task manager are built into SimpleOne.

Summary

Every year the requirements for SSCs are growing, their tasks are expanding. SSCs are turning into multifunctional centers in which bookkeeping, personnel, financial and other departments can work simultaneously. In such conditions, the choice of a software solution for automating processes and an integrator must be approached carefully and taking into account how the software fits into the existing business processes of the company, which processes will have to be transformed, and also how flexibly the development team responds to new requirements and changes.

We always recommend that our customers use such an automation tool with which you can flexibly customize processes to fit your needs. The right tool and competent work of engineers allow us to achieve the necessary quality of service and customer satisfaction, reduce costs and overhead, get consistent and standardized business processes, and also increase the level of control over the SSC.

How to Automate a Shared Service Center