Analysis
Global Shared Services Survey Report for 2021
During the coronavirus crisis, organisations are placing emphasis on process quality, digitalisation and talent development
Standardisation and process efficiency enhancement are the goals that shared service centres are focusing on most in their strategies in 2021. And, as Deloitte's global survey has shown, they are doing more than well: up to 78% of the surveyed organisations are implementing successful solutions in this area. Other major trends in strategy development include a focus on reducing costs or increasing business value. Innovative solutions in analytics, reporting and digitalisation help companies maintain a stable business development.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, organisations have begun to focus more on creating tangible business value in innovative ways. Companies are increasingly relying on global service delivery models that have the benefit of creating business value efficiently at lower costs. In addition, organisations are increasingly investing in the strategic capabilities of shared service centres, focusing on talent selection and new ways of working. Digital transformation is also helping companies find a competitive advantage.
Key findings of Deloitte's Global Shared Services Survey 2021
Shared service centres are investing more in strategic capabilities. These are a source of business insights and help parent organisations create added value. Organisations focus most on areas such as standardisation and process efficiency increase (88%), cost reduction (84%) and business value management (73%).
Hybrid workplaces are key to creating quality strategies, bringing higher productivity and lower costs to organisations. Seventy-three percent of the surveyed companies plan to adopt a hybrid model, while only 9% of companies want to maintain a purely physical workplace model.
Organisations are placing more emphasis on talent. Employee experience and training as well as the creation of innovative virtual models or efforts to increase diversity in the management of companies and work teams will play a major role. Organisations are currently focusing on three areas in particular: building a strong company culture (77%), wellbeing (63%) and developing and innovating existing solutions (62%).
The future of global enterprise services organisations lies in digitalisation. The most common innovations include process automation – 56% of companies are already using this technology and 33% are in the process of implementing it. Other major innovations include robotisation (69%), enterprise resource planning (ERP) within a single instance (54%) and cloud solutions (51%).
About the Global Shared Services Survey
Since 1999, Deloitte has been conducting biennial surveys to identify current trends in service sharing and determine how organisations are actually using these innovative practices to address their business challenges and better meet their customers’ needs.
Read a summary of the key findings of our study and be inspired by the global business trends in your company.
