How to align Lean strategy and process efficiency in the Shared Services Business?

Organisations worldwide not only cut costs through outsourcing or setting-up shared services, but they can also make processes more efficient, and value-driven, through a continuous change management process. The lean strategy is preferable since it maximises customer value while minimising waste.

Leadership Support

Developing an effective Shared Services strategy requires a complete understanding of company needs, systems and processes necessary to implement them. It is essential to ensure that company leadership is fully on-board with the team’s goal and is available to guide the effort.

Company Assessment and right goals

The number one step in creating a shared services strategy with a detailed assessment of business circumstances. With cost reduction being a primary operator, other goals such as improving internal control, sustainability, enhancing employee engagement and building a pool of talented employees are essential.

Region-specific assessment

All service centres and associated business units need location strategy. The strategy must cover present technology status, level of standardisation of processes, documentation of processes, current costs and staff availability. It must include the assessment of locally available talent, cost of operations, legal and regional tax laws, language capabilities, and other factors pertinent to the region or location.

Creating a Master plan

Creating an outstanding master plan that figures out what shared services could do for the company and what are the essential steps for its superior performance is required. There must be full support from senior executives of the organisations. An approach supported by a span of control, along with an ideal delivery design, can help the company create better ideas, performance metrics, and form a base for both strategic and operational planning.

Examine the Feasibility

This feasibility study can help to shape the opportunities in the existing model and articulate the productivity improvements that shared services can bring.

Once planning is complete, it is crucial to begin developing more detailed plans for design and implementation. It includes a strategy to re-engineer standard processes, recognising right technology required to operate shared services appropriately.

Documentation is required for the new organisational roles, necessary technology tools, and to measure its effectiveness. With existing services spread across various sites, companies should evaluate each site for existing talent, labour costs, technical infrastructure, risk factors and language capabilities. Lay-offs and inefficiencies must be eliminated to guarantee success.

Technology Blueprint

Effective information technology solutions help service centres offer their support to functional units more productively and efficiently. While designing and documenting the processes, the transition team must include the technologies required.

Administration

Companies must be clear of how shared services units can communicate with internal customers and control the performance of external supporting service providers. Administration simplifies roles and maintains alignment of procedures and goals across the enterprise.

Operational cost

Accounting for shared services consulting costs and profitability is of utmost importance. Many companies run their shared service centres as standalone businesses that charge for the services they provide to business units.

Implement Lean Policy

It is an approach for bringing process and quality betterment to every direction in the service delivery. Executing is relatively simple; still, it is essential to be mindful of risks and address problems that one can miss in the planning stages. The company must continuously work to improve, integrate, and streamline services delivered to business units.

Two Techniques to be considered:

Lean practice is highly acceptable for shared services and empowers all groups to improve processes each day.

Six Sigma Policy–This strategy uses data to abolish defects. Implementation of the same allows leaders to define problems, measure results, analyse data, design new solutions, and verify that those solutions are effective.

Summary:

Six Sigma Consulting Shared services are becoming a critical need for larger corporations as well as small and medium organisations. Deploying Lean practice as an organisation grows and establishes many locations across many regions is necessary. Three is a high probability of improved performance by the removal of needless and inefficient support services. If not, organisations tend to continue with the complicated process, generate waste, compliance risks, and inability to adopt new technologies. Organisations with the ability to innovate freely and reduce cost may gain a competitive benefit. Executing shared services requires close alignment with all the stakeholders across the business to make sure that new service centres are implemented and run as efficiently as possible.

Are you ready to make the leap into Lean focused digital transformation for your Shared Services Business?