Independent Shared Services

Major Fortune 500 companies have been using shared services as an efficient, effective means of providing corporate support services to subordinate businesses since the 1980s. Major companies like British Petroleum, Ford, General Electric, and others have used the shared services model to reduce costs, improve service, improve compliance, and/or streamline processes with great success. A survey conducted by the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON) in conjunction with Hackett reports that at least 30 percent of companies enjoy greater than 20 percent cost savings by implementing this model. Some companies have reported much higher savings.

Introduction

Business analytics and its potential value to organizations have been a frequent topic of discussion across industries over the last several years. Organizations have spent significant time and money installing and stabilizing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, data warehouses, and Business Intelligence (BI) tools in an effort to more accurately capture operational data and use it to predict future business performance. The age of social media has spawned a whole new focus on “unstructured data” and how to analyze such information, while advances in digital and mobile technology have allowed us to collect data for almost anything.

ScottMadden believes that change management is most effective when embedded within a project and least effective when it is stand-alone or “bolt-on.” Too many organizations allow for significant segregation between Project Management’s executional focus and the activities of a change team. A key point of our success is the ability of our team to integrate change management within transformational projects. In this article, we focus on effective change techniques and processes and provide an overview of ScottMadden’s extensive change management tool kit, including ScottMadden’s change model.