Shared Services for Shared Success
Gelco helps pave the way to greater company-wide consolidation

Everyone, it seems, is talking about centralization. But is this déjà vu all over again? It's only been about twenty years since many multidivisional companies decentralized, moving support services into their separate business units. A mere two decades later, the trend has reversed itself. Or has it? A lot can happen in twenty years.

These days, new technologies are making centralization not only popular, but profitable. Shared services—the centralized management of activities for multiple users—is fast becoming the preferred method of handling support operations in major enterprise companies. Perhaps a better word might be consolidation. Shared services is not so much about centralizing support services in one physical location as it is about consolidation, standardization, automation, and a customer-service orientation. Many companies view shared services as a way to consolidate business processes in order to boost the bottom line now and stay competitive in the future.

Shared objectives
But what do shared services have to do with T&E? In a word—everything. Because it is a routine, high-volume activity where capturing economies of scale can make a huge difference, expense management (along with other transactional services, such as payroll and purchasing) is one of the first types of functions companies consider as they work toward implementing shared services.

Shared services and automated T&E are not merely compatible, they're part and parcel of the same competitive business strategy:

• A key objective of shared services is transparency. Gelco's automated T&E solution provides visibility into consolidated travel spend.
• A significant component of the shared services environment is focusing on the end-users. Gelco's automated solution is based on the end-user and designed to make expense reporting easy and user-friendly.
• A major goal of shared services is cost savings. Gelco's ExpenseLink can reduce the cost of processing an expense report by 50% or more and help clients improve card incentives up to 10% and improve travel spend savings up to 10%.

Shared benefits
Shared services is not a passing fad. Major studies on the subject predict that greater automation and greater consolidation will go hand in hand as companies, large and small, move toward paperless processes. The ability to standardize processes while working from remote locations is fundamental for leading global companies. With the capacity for flexibility and customization, shared services and Gelco's automated T&E solution will continue to offer an increasing variety of related benefits:

• Visibility – Cost transparency is one of the principles of shared services. Visibility is one of the key benefits of the Gelco solution. When managers know how, where, when, and why their dollars are spent across the organization, they can make better business decisions, and they can leverage the data to negotiate volume discounts with vendors.
• Streamlined business processes – Shared services are designed to increase efficiency and maximize productivity. Gelco's automated solution ensures that expense reporting, payment, and audit processes are consistent across all departments and business units, even when these separate entities maintain distinct policies or regulations.
• Customization – Another significant principle of shared services is that internal customers define their own needs and level of service. With Gelco's automated solution, departments can customize policy configurations and data reporting for their own accounts, while shared services staff can access all accounts and take advantage of organizational reporting.
• Best practices – Shared services is built on a best practices approach to business processes. An established best practice in T&E expense management, Gelco's solution offers opportunities for win-win partnerships between internal and outsourced operations.

Lessons Learned for Shared Success
By eliminating redundancies and creating a high-performing service culture, shared services can help companies retain a competitive edge. Nevertheless, there may be as much resistance today to re-centralizing, as there was to decentralizing a few decades ago. Gelco client Julie Speirs, manager of Corporate Services for International Rectifier, says that having already successfully implemented the Gelco solution has helped smooth the transition to a shared services environment.

International Rectifier, headquartered in El Segundo, California with 6,000 employees worldwide, revenues of more than $1 billion, and manufacturing and operations in more than 20 countries, has been a Gelco client since 2003. The company is now in the process of establishing three regional shared services centers (in United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia), where T&E, payroll, and all procure-to-pay services will be located.

Speirs says there was more support for the idea of shared services than there might otherwise have been, thanks to the benefits the company has realized since implementing the Gelco solution—savings, standardization, and improved SOX compliance. Nevertheless, implementing shared services is a major undertaking for any company and Speirs says there are several crucial challenges:

• Create an effective communication strategy. Good communications should explain what is taking place and why. They should also take into account different styles and cultures.
• Secure the support of senior level management before you begin the process.
• Be sure to have the right people in place; commit the necessary financial and human resources to the project to ensure its success.
• Provide support, service, and training every step of the way. One goal of shared services is to create a service-oriented culture. Demonstrate your commitment to service at the outset.

The Future is Here
Gelco is keeping pace with the evolving needs of today's global companies. International Rectifier is in the process of migrating 11 divisions in Asia and Europe to Gelco solutions as it works toward the completion of its global shared services implementation. Scalability is just one more shared benefit of Gelco's automated solution and shared services. "We're growing together," Speirs said.

With clear objectives and careful implementation, shared services— from human resources, to tax and legal, to automated T&E expense management—can result in shared success across the company. With the Gelco solution in place, you're already on your way.