Although most Finance personnel would agree that moving various processes to a Shared Service Center makes sense, there is often a debate about which processes can be handled by a Shared Serivce Organization  and which one are better kept at the Business Unit level.

The second debate that I current see that's related to the first point is the issue of process complexity.  Most people are comfortable with moving the Accounts Payable function to an SSC, but what about general ledger account reconciliation?  What about Treasury?  Many companies are asking these questions to determine what's right for them.

An article written by Chris Gunning, the Director of Shared Services at UNISYS illustrates this perfectly. The article, which appears on the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network website, is titled The Next Port of Call for Finance SSOs.  Mr. Gunning talks about the process of handing off Finance processes from the Business Unit to a Regional Center, with the goal of evaluating which processes could even move to global processing center.

One process he brings up is that of Receivables Collections.  He notes that there is often resistance to this particular process by the Business Units.  That jumped out at me because in my consulting experience I often encounter the same type of resistance.  Business Units are quick to point out how important it is to be physically close to the customer.  (What, are they running over there with a hard copy of the invoice?).  They point out that people in a remote location can't possibly understand their business and that it's too hard to collect from a central location.  Hogwash, all of it.  I'd be hard pressed to think of an example where it didn't make sense to have some or all of the collection process in a Shared Service Center.

The rest of the article talks about the possibilities of moving up the value curve by adding increasingly complex processes to the Shared Service Organization.  It's an excellent article that is certainly worth reading.