The shared services concept, both in its in-house and outsourced flavours, is driven by a number of business objectives. If we asked a group of people to list these objectives, we would probably see cost reduction coming high on the list. Process efficiency would probably score highly too.

The cost reduction is historically achieved by centralising activities in one place to get economies of scale, and often this is accompanied by a shift to a lower cost location. In more recent times, cost reduction is achieved by a focus on automation, including robotics and machine learning. Continue reading Shared Services or Self Services? →