Did you know?

Globally, 70% of executives report their shared services as either successful or extremely successful; 75% in North America share that view.
– Success Through Shared Services,
A.T. Kearney Inc., 2004

“Shared Services” is a term used to describe the centralized management of an organization’s common processes, such as expense management, payroll and employee benefits. By developing a Shared Services environment, organizations can provide consistency in policy and practice for common functions across business units, departments, divisions, and regions or across the entire global organization.

There are many benefits of having a Shared Services environment. As geographical limitations and political borders become more transparent within an organization, process consistency for common functions becomes increasingly important, especially relative to employee productivity. An employee transferring to an office in a different country, for example, should be able to complete and submit their expense report with the same ease as when at their company headquarters.

Newly acquired business entities can also be more easily controlled and transitioned under a Shared Services model and operational efficiencies obtained more quickly when business process management is centralized. Multiple platforms are easily integrated, facilitating the smooth transition. Shared Services, due to the centralized nature of its decision-making, expedites the on-boarding process, cutting costs and bringing the new division or subsidiary into operational alignment more quickly. It allows for more effective monitoring and management of company travel policies, particularly relating to compliance with vendor contracts. Compliance with vendor travel contracts across the extended enterprise optimizes travel spend savings and enhances bargaining power for future negotiations.

Standardization of policy across the breadth of an organization increases employee satisfaction by communicating a fair, single company standard. While regional and cultural factors must be taken into account when defining category limits in an expense management policy, there should still exist a reasonable business standard between employees at the same organizational level across business units or divisions. Business standardization of expense management policies can be integrated across the breadth of the organization while allowing for regional variations such as mileage allowances, per diem allowances and more.

Business standardization is also instrumental in a corporation’s fraud prevention and regulatory compliance efforts. While different cultural protocols and regulations must be accommodated around the world, the travel policies of the organization as well as the manner of governing employee behavior should be enforced evenhandedly across the corporation. Too much variation causes employee confusion which leads to non-compliance or fraud. The cost of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance can also be made more efficient when efforts are conducted across the business enterprise rather than by each individual entity. For example, Gelco Expense Management has a SAS 70 Type II certification that can eliminate work associated with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Under a Shared Services environment, the resources saved by the entire corporation would be significant.

Standardized business travel policies and processes across a corporation’s various locations coupled with the Shared Services centralized oversight, allows increased visibility of expense reports activities through company-wide reporting. Gelco Reporting and Analysis permits for cross-account travel spend averaging and comparison to corporate benchmarks. For example, a functional area in one division of a corporation can be compared to the same functional area in another division. Business units within a region can be combined and compared to business units in another region. All current Gelco ExpenseLink or Ceridian Expense Manager customers already have the capability to standardize their expense management business processes.

Gelco works with many shared services customers. Our solution supports and enhances shared service environments. We can help your organization transition to this organizational model. If moving to a Shared Services environment is of interest to you, you can begin your centralization efforts through your current Gelco Expense Management solution. As we mentioned, Reporting and Analysis can today be consolidated to provide business information across multiple Gelco accounts. In addition, Gelco often provides expense management services to multiple individual subsidiaries within a corporation. If you represent the corporate headquarters of your organization, we suggest you contact Gelco to help identify the various divisions utilizing our services. We will be able to ease your transition to a Shared Services model and seamlessly integrate your organization without employee disruption.