What does access to an organization’s shared services mean for a subsidiary company’s leadership teams and employees?
With a never-ending increase in vendors, regulations, and technology, business leaders need every opportunity to reduce the cost, complexity and headaches of operations.
“With ML’s shared services, we can focus on our customers and employees, rather than on transactional tasks. We get greater agility, efficiency, and innovation within the organization, ultimately leading to a better customer and employee experience,” says Darrin Brown, President of McClung-Logan.
A shared services model allows a company to centralize many functions and processes that are commonly used across various operating groups. By centralizing these services, businesses can find purchasing efficiencies, reduce the diversity of their systems, and improve training, compliance, and maintenance.
- Improved communication: Improving communication and collaboration across different departments and business units is another key feature of utilizing a shared services approach. Eliminating separate budgets, departments, and silos creates a more cohesive and aligned organization, with greater bench depth, and peer-to-peer mentoring.
- Scalability & Flexibility: Agility and responsiveness are essential in today’s fast-paced business environment. With centralized thinking, companies can more easily adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs. Having an overarching bird’s eye view of internal and external resources helps with allocation and prioritization for organizational performance.
- Standardization: With a more consistent process and procedure, companies can remedy inefficiencies and replicate best practices across the organization. This leads to improved company-wide training and performance metrics. For example, shared HR, Benefits and Payroll services can help right-size department staffing and level-set salaries. Consistent new hire processes and interview training can ensure you’re attracting the type of candidates who will deliver results within your unique organization.
- Improved efficiency: By centralizing key services, organizations can streamline operations. This leads to faster and more accurate decision-making and opens resources to focus on business-critical priorities. For example, shared Finance services can offer more experienced support over key systems and operating policies, centralized budgeting, and relationships with major financial institutions.
- Cost Savings: By centralizing common functions and processes, companies can reduce the number of resources required to perform these tasks. For example, having a central IT service, vs independent IT services across companies can create a bigger picture cost savings, as resources can be shared more efficiently.
Switching to a shared services mindset may have a few wrinkles, but it is a structurally simple, implementable, and affordable way to find significant advantages in today’s competitive market. By centralizing common functions and processes, companies can reduce costs, improve efficiency, standardize processes and procedures, improve communication and collaboration, and streamline scalability and flexibility. These benefits can help businesses to stay competitive and achieve greater success in the long run.
ML Holdings Company provides shared services in IT, HR, Benefits, Payroll, Marketing, Procurement, Finance, Real Estate, Risk Management, and Legal services. You can find more on our approach here.
