The Proper Way to Share - Martin Boyd, SunGard AvantGard

Many companies have failed to reap the full benefits of centralised services because they haven’t shared out their responsibilities in the right way. Martin Boyd of SunGard AvantGard tells Charlotte Stoker how to create Share Service Centres (SSCs).

Shared services are a rational response to the search for lower costs. For example, centralising receivables can result in staff cuts of as much as 25%. However, as Martin Boyd, COO of SunGard AvantGard, says: "While a lot of businesses have done this, many haven’t actually ended up achieving the full returns due to the way they have interacted with the business units."

He explains that in the case of business-to-business receivables, a central team that just checks bank statements and receipts against invoices while rigorously policing collections will never understand that a payment may be overdue because of non-delivery or a dispute involving customer satisfaction.

Therefore, by acting in isolation, a centralised receivables team could wreck a customer relationship that sales have carefully nurtured. "The people most qualified to interact with the client are in the business unit responsible for selling the invoiced products," he says.

SHARE SERVICE CENTRES - CENTRALISED SERVICE

Companies can only gain both the cost benefits of centralised functions as well as the advantages of efficient flow and appropriate use of data by creating SSCs, where the various corporate relationships with a single customer are not divorced from each other.

This argument is equally valid for the treasury function, particularly when managing diverse business units, says Boyd. "For example, if you centralise your cash forecasting but you don’t have a good method of feedback and data sharing with the business units that are actually taking orders or making payments, then you have precisely the same difficulty. The treasury is making decisions about the future cash-funding requirements of the organisation when it probably has only 50% of the data it needs to make good decisions."

SUITE OF TREASURY, PAYMENTS AND RECEIVABLE PRODUCTS

SunGard’s AvantGard suite of treasury, payments and receivable products enable its customers to implement SSCs on global or regional levels, regardless of the main ERP platform. As Boyd points out, the adaptability of the software is particularly suited to businesses that have inherited or acquired disparate systems.

The AvantGard SSC products work over existing business intelligence systems, adding value. Boyd explains, "They bring the tactical advantage of allowing a company to implement platform approach liquidity management, which integrates existing transaction systems, eliminates silos of information and reduces redundant and wasted effort. There is more than just cost savings here; there is also the ability to achieve world-class quality in liquidity management."

SSC – PROMOTING CONSISTENCY, DISCIPLINE AND BEST PRACTICES

On a strategic level, an SSC promotes consistency, discipline and best practices across the most far-flung businesses. Boyd says, "By creating one standard for releasing payments you not only get better control, but you also have cost-effective compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory mandates."

AvantGard SSC solutions improve controls, visibility and performance while fostering enterprise-wide collaboration and reducing the total cost of ownership of technology investments.

WORLDWIDE CUSTOMER SUPPORT

"We now have 1,600 AvantGard customers worldwide, whom we support from three centres in Asia, Europe and North America," says Boyd. "We have also seen vigorous take-up of our offer to host the AvantGard SSC services, which lowers the barrier to adopting such powerful systems, gets them up and running faster and frees management to get on with running the business."

For companies that want to see the full benefits of shared services, setting up an SSC may well provide the solution.