Moving to a Shared Service Center

Moving house is stressful.  Aside from organizing transport, packing everything up, redirecting mail, and other details, you’ll be trying to get back up and running as quickly as possible.  The same can be said, in more extreme terms, for a business move.  However, in the case of many business relocations, such as moving multiple functions into one shared service center (SSC), planning for consolidation becomes a job in itself.

Moving to a shared service center can dramatically reduce business costs, indeed over 60% of Fortune 500 businesses take this approach.  Consolidation and centralization of services in one location brings economies of scale, as well as enforcing standardization and more efficient working practices.

A centralized approach to certain business functions makes perfect sense – particularly in a digital world, where increased volumes of data stack nicely on a centralized server.  Previously disparate teams can come together under one roof, sharing information and working as one to service multiple regions or connected departments.

Why duplicate systems and teams across multiple locations, when one team, working with a centralized data-structure can work far more efficiently – eliminating duplication and wasted efforts.

Moving print to a Shared Service Center

Whilst data and digital content can be consolidated with relative ease, paper presents a far greater challenge.  Businesses may be able to bring together disparate systems, rationalize and consolidate business functions to one location, but bringing the print and post functions of the mailroom or post room into one location can present a major challenge.

Moving print and post into one centralized location can certainly reduce the volume of print-related hardware across the whole business, as well as maintenance required.  But this channels more print volume through a smaller set of hardware, creating efficiency through pressure.

But with increased pressure, paper, and printing requirements can stack up, or worse; become jumbled.

In addition to the challenge of supporting a higher flow of print, international businesses can suffer higher postage costs.  Centrally printed documents may need to be distributed to an international set of locations, resulting in higher stamp expenditure as well as longer delivery times.

Improving on the Shared Service Centre model

Where print volumes threaten to overwhelm a single location, the answer lies in outsourcing the print requirements.  Outsourcing print and postage offers the benefits of a centralized process, but can also leverage the benefits of localized print and postage across multiple locations.

Extending the scope of a mailroom, or post room, beyond print and post, into electronic document distribution (operating as a virtual mailroom), affords the opportunity to vastly increase distribution volume per unit time, at the same time as driving down costs – through the elimination of print, paper and postage costs.

Moving from print and post into the paradigm of electronic document distribution presents benefits far beyond immediate cost savings and efficiency improvements.  Unlike traditional post, electronic delivery can be verified (in real time) and resends can be triggered automatically, at no extra cost, if the initial delivery is not verified as received.  Further to this, document readership, and even electronically-validated acceptance, can also be reported, audited and used to trigger follow-up actions automatically.

How to make your move to a Shared Service Centre a success

Motivations for moving to a Shared Service Centre typically include improvements in efficiency, expenditure, visibility of processes and standardization.  When considering the centralization of the mailroom or post room function, it is wise to examine the benefits of outsourcing the document distribution to an expert partner, such as Corcentric.

Corcentric not only reduces overheads of office space and hardware, but brings benefits of electronic document distribution and localized print and postage services (where print is required) creating efficiency as well as complete real-time visibility of every step in the distribution process.