CASE STUDY: SSC Location Selection
£1.5M SAVINGS PER YEAR
SET UP EUROPEAN SSC
NEW MODAL STABILISED
OVERVIEW
Our client, a global Japanese technology business diversified their offerings as they found new applications for their technology. This had meant that they had grown in a fragmented manner and now were looking for opportunities at cost reduction and standardisation within their back-office functions. Our initial brief was to conduct an assessment as to whether a shared services would work for them, but as we built our partnership with the organisation, we were able to use our expertise to support them through all stages from design, to implementation and stabilisation of their new model.
CHALLENGES
The history of diversification within the organisation meant that the client had multiple offices offering a wide variety of products and services across Europe. Each of these operations had back-office functions working independently of each other with wildly different working practises. In terms of cost effectiveness and service, we could see that there were huge opportunities to be gained from breaking down these silos. Identifying and unravelling the ‘what, where, when and how’ of moving diverse internal services was understandably complex.
WE DELIVERED
Proservartner delivered training to align the leadership team behind a joint understanding of a shared service organisation. This provided the foundation for the project as it created a shared vision of what they wanted to achieve. With this in place we were able to map out current processes across Finance, HR and IT then worked through methodology to agree which elements of delivery should sit within shared services. We ensured that the plan brought together the right technology, people, governance, metrics for the move to be successful. With the right processes mapped out we performed multi-disciplinary analytics and rigorous process for location selection. We analysed potential locations based on five key factors – strategy alignment, cost, skills availability, risk and infrastructure and then
provided transition specialists: practitioners with relevant experience and strong project management skills, to put the plan into place as part of a joint team.
OUR RESULTS
The leadership team selected Gdańsk in Poland as the site that offered the most benefit, both in terms of short term gains and their longer term strategy. This became the European centre for all process within Finance and later HR, with elements of IT service being delivered by an outsourcing partner. Our pragmatic phased delivery approach meant that an ambitious roll out plan was bought into and delivered. The initiative has achieved significant cost savings, around £1.5 million per year meeting the targets of the business case.