THE SHARED SERVICE CENTRE (SSC) – A NEW BUSINESS CONCEPT

• Main Author: Lazar Timea
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: University of Oradea 2017-07-01
• Series: Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science
• Subjects: shared service centre, organizational change, strategic alliances, outsourcing, intercultural competences
• Online Access: http://anale.steconomiceuoradea.ro/volume/2017/n1/65.pdf
• ISSN: 1222-569X; 1582-5450

In this paper I am going to write about shared service centres. It is a big challenge for all types of companies anywhere in the world to “survive” in our globalized and accelerated world. Their primary objective is to stay competitive, keep or even enlarge their market share while keeping their costs at minimum level. Nowadays they can only be competitive if they “reinvent” themselves: use new forms of business, form alliances to cut costs and enlarge their customer base. In our world everything changes so fast that for companies it is really essential to be flexible and adapt to new challenges. It has also become typical that these corporations cross borders and operate on a multinational level. In order to do that successfully they need flexible workforce: people who have intercultural competences and can help their corporations achieve their aim of profit maximizing. In the late 1990s a new organizational change approach appeared the shared service concept. Since that it has become popular in many parts of the world as it has a number of advantages: cost reduction, deploying new technology and a customer- oriented way of conducting business. Many researchers agree that the performance of companies can improve using the shared service format because they can concentrate on their core business within the company. A shared service centre can perform various functions in the company: finance, human resources (HR), legal, and information technology (IT), communications and public relations. This business model also has some drawbacks: there can be high transition costs when establishing a shared service centre and sometimes it is difficult to determine the accountabilities and the priorities within the shared service centres. Shared service centres need well- educated and well- motivated global workforce and it is a real challenge to find these people and keep them in the long run. It is true that technological advances are very important but so are the people.