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Top highlights from Deloitte's 2017 global shared services survey

• Shared services centers (SSCs) deliver greater value year after year. This year, 73 percent of respondents reported shared services productivity increases of 5 percent or higher, up from 70 percent in 2015.
• Knowledge-based processes are on the rise. Although transactional processes remain predominant at SSCs, adoption of more complex, knowledge-based processes has doubled or in some cases, tripled since 2013.
• Functional scope continues to expand. The number of SSCs with more than three functions continues to rise dramatically, from 20 percent in 2013, to 31 percent in 2015, and now 53 percent in 2017.
• Here come the robots. Robotic process automation is a rapidly emerging technology that will fundamentally change how SSCs operate, slashing the effort for routine tasks and enabling advanced cognitive applications that augment or replace human judgment in knowledge-based processes.
• Proximity matters more than ever. While cost remains a top priority when establishing or relocating SSCs, organizations are increasingly emphasizing proximity to existing operations or headquarters.
• Lift-and-shift is the favored migration approach. Most organizations opt for higher speed and lower risk by moving activities to an SSC as-is, rather than simultaneously trying to standardize processes and implement new systems.
• Global business services face pushback. While there is still significant movement toward a global business services (GBS) model, 72 percent of organizations not currently using GBS do not plan to make the shift, and 4 percent tried GBS but switched back.