Shared services

As organisations struggle to create and sustain shareholder value, executives are continually challenged to deliver effective business processes. In particular, organisations and CFOs are faced with the triple challenges of

• creating a finance and administration organisation that adds value
• deploying consistent high quality global e-business processes
• providing business transaction processing at increasingly low unit costs (typically at less than 0.5% of total revenue).

The market in which companies operate is characterised by globalisation, mergers, acquisitions and consolidation requiring companies to standardise operations to stay competitive. An effective way of keeping costs down and improving efficiency is by moving certain functions to one central location. Centralisation is only half the story. An increasingly popular and effective way to meet this challenge and achieve sustainable benefits is for companies to set up a shared services centre.

UNIT4 and Shared Services

UNIT4's solutions have a 30-year history of helping medium and large organisations around the world to improve their financial processes, automate operations and deliver greater value. For example:

• Agresso Business World

  Our Agresso financial information system is well suited to a shared services environment, with a strong uptake for shared services operations - particularly in the public sector. More than 50 health organisations use the system and more than half are working as part of a shared service.  Other shared service customers include police forces, fire authorities and councils, all of whom are realising the benefits of reduced technology and procurement costs, increased flexibility and the sharing of knowledge and expertise. The Agresso solution's flexibility and agility enable customers to cope easily with operational expansion, reorganisation and change, whilst its powerful reporting capabilities ensure that even the most demanding stakeholder requirements can be met with ease.

• CODA Financials

  Our CODA international finance application is specifically designed for single-instance implementations. It offers world-class multicompany, multi-lingual and multi-currency support within a single version of the application, allowing it to accommodate the multiple legislative and cultural differences inherent in running different national companies within the same system. An unrivalled account code structure with up to 8 dimensions allows CODA Financials to cope easily with multiple corporate and reporting structures, and give ultimate flexibility. A full browser-based interface allows users to use and administer the finance system from any location.

Amongst our 5000+ clients are a whole spectrum of examples of those that have implemented UNIT4 solutions as the basis for Pan-European and global shared services. Some have opted for centralised implementation as a path to outsourcing of core administrative functions, whilst others have managed their applications centrally with international roll-out to support core business processes, remote operations and business partners more effectively and cheaply.

Further information

To discover more about the full range of ways that we can help your organisation, please:

• either read more about our ERP-based, best-of-class on-premise or best-of-class on-demand financial management solutions
• or read more on this site about our sector focus, solutions, services or company
• or contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.