February 08 2022 0comment

Digital Transformation is Shared Services Priority

Over the past year, some enterprises have prioritized accelerating their digital agenda as another top objective for investing in SSCs. According to a recent report, 80% of organisations now think that digital transformation is currently a priority, and 50% have a ‘tactical roadmap for digital planning and prioritisation. By integrating automation, AI, data analytics, and other digital technologies into their operations, shared services organizations can enhance the existing system and processes globally.

The existing solutions can process only simple transactions; they are inadequate in a digital world that requires timely, more frequent, and increasingly complex customer and vendor interactions. Organizations with an existing shared services center can overcome this problem by emphasizing less on simple manual tasks and concentrating their efforts on formulating and implementing efficient and customer-friendly service options.

Let us look at some key technologies at the forefront of such change within global shared service processes:

Touchless Processing:

SSC leaders are looking for innovative ways to drive touchless processing of transactions using artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. To operate smoothly while ensuring that the SOPs are accurately followed, enterprises must switch to contactless and touchless processing of transactions. By leveraging touchless and automated workflows, enterprises can generate, send, receive, process, and validate documents without any manual intervention. And, you can ensure smart decision making, reduced turnaround times, cost efficiency, improved agility, and increased scalability.

Robotic Process Automation:

SSCs stand to benefit immensely from RPA as it improves efficiency, reduces costs and increases ROI. This allows organizations to shift their workforce to higher-value tasks, as RPA takes care of low-value repetitive tasks. Most SSCs and GBS are still in the early phases of shared services automation, primarily using unattended robots, with little to no functionality or intelligence, to improve several back-office tasks. However, as RPA has increased its capabilities – through embedded and Artificial Intelligence, SSCs would be able to perform more cognitive-heavy tasks automatically while keeping human employees in the loop.

Advanced Analytics:

Shared services organizations can leverage predictive analytics using data from multiple departments and perform cross-functional analytics that can deliver unique operational insights. In a recent global survey, 61% of respondents said that the data analytics in their organizations was still ‘basic’, while 27% said they had sufficiently competent analytics. Only 8% had capabilities for complex event processing and neural networks. Enterprises today are increasingly looking towards predictive analytics to manage uncertainties and make swift and sound decisions.

Artificial Intelligence:

AI will increasingly be adopted by enterprises worldwide for business transformation with newer capabilities of AI already being used by some organizations like facial recognition and natural language processing (NLP). For global business services organizations, AI can mean automation beyond RPA. Using cognitive AI and analytics, organizations can use unstructured data and handle complex marketing, finance, accounting, and customer service processes with automation.

Shared services can become the core backbone for an enterprise’s goals relating to agility and innovation by moving up the value chain both in terms of processes covered as well as on how they cover them by leveraging new business models combined with digital technology.