ABSTRACT

Mr Andy Wong

Regional IT Director, Asia Pacific (co-author)

Nike International Limited

Business Blueprint for the 21st Century: Shared Service Centres

With the advent of World Wide Web and increasing popularity of Internet Computing, there are more and more companies adopting the model of "Shared Service Centres (SSC)" in the Enterprise Computing world. Shared Service Centres are initially evolved and focused on simple administrative functions like account payable and receivable and later expand to embrace a wider geographic area and more business functions.

All around the world, there is a very pronounced shift from decentralized operations to centralized operations, emphasizing shared service centers.

Several factors are at the heart of this expansion:

• By centralizing business processes delivery in one or a few locations, businesses are looking at maximizing efficiency and economies of scale, but also at serving their customers better. This is new. Only few years ago, motivations for setting-up a Shared Service Center were limited to hardware cost savings.
• Specifically in Europe, the advent of the Euro (EMU) will make this move much easier. The euro will drive a better price transparency, a centralization of bank relationships and cash management, an increase in cross-border transactions and an harmonization of business processes. All are required ingredients for the Shared Service Center model to grow and prosper. In fact, there is a wide consensus that the opportunity to build shared service centers in Europe is a major benefit of the Euro.
• The Internet will continue to change the way companies operate. With ERP package becoming fully web enabled, Internet Computing is becoming the corporate architecture. This provides geographically dispersed operations with the cost-effective and ubiquitous link they need with their Shared Service Center.
• Unsurprisingly, companies that are late in addressing their Year 2000 compliance problem are discovering that a Shared Service Center might be a way of fixing the "Millennium bug" only once, instead of having to handle each site separately. �
• Finally, a number of companies which previously decided to outsource their IT infrastructure to a third-party are starting to re-internalize. Some of them take this opportunity to create their Shared Service Center (this move is often called "insourcing").

This paper will provide you with an overview of business benefits derived from various companies which implemented one or several Shared Service Center supported by ERP package in an Internet Computing model.

But we also believe that the Shared Service Center model is not without risks. Therefore, we will also highlight some of the drawbacks and pitfalls emphasized by some of our customers who went through the process of implementing a successful SSC.

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