Operational Excellence

Service center strategy - the framework of operational excellence

The definition of your service portfolio and the optimization of your processes and governance should be embedded in a comprehensive service center strategy. This defines an operational vision and mission for your service centers (e.g. HR, finance, IT). In addition, it answers questions regarding shoring or sourcing, for example, and which control logic is applied in the service centers (e.g. through key performance indicator systems).

The service center strategy should be in line with the corporate strategy (business development) and can be highly transformative in its implementation both for the company as a whole and, in particular, for the individual service centers (transformation management).

Services - what your organization should provide

Depending on your personal service center strategy, your service portfolio can be defined and harmonized for individual service centers (e.g. Strategic IT projects) or across the board. Regardless of the specific service center, your services should include a clear value proposition for your customers.

We support your service organization in optimizing the defined scope of services by putting your service benefits in relation to your service costs. We help you to establish effective financial management processes for planning and budgeting in order to consistently track your service costs in a plan/actual logic. Conceptually, we support you in the introduction of a pragmatic cost allocation model that enables you to allocate costs between services in a way that is transparent for your customers.

Depending on the specific requirements of your organization, we work closely with you to analyse and decide on the breadth and depth of the specific service portfolio. In principle, there are options for aligning your service portfolio with the customer's business processes, the organizational structure or, in the case of IT, the system landscape. In view of the fact that defining and maintaining services sometimes requires a considerable amount of resources, we follow the guiding principle of defining services pragmatically and tailoring them to the specific requirements of your company. We do not adhere to rigid frameworks.

Once the transformation of your service center has been completed in the first stage (transformation management), we work with you to define service portfolio management processes that enable your service organization to optimally shape your service portfolio once the project is complete, without external help.

Processes and governance - how your organization delivers its services effectively

Delivering high-quality services tailored to your customers' needs is only one side of the coin. Operational excellence in your company also means that the processes in your service organizations (e.g. request fulfillment, change management) are also optimized. In addition to the well-known levers of process optimization, our approach includes using workload balancing models as well as targeted employee qualification and specialization to minimize unproductive times.

We support you in establishing processes and governance structures that do not yet exist and in improving existing structures in terms of increasing maturity (e.g. in accordance with ITIL). We have a wide range of tools and analysis methods at our disposal to quickly identify the qualitative strengths and weaknesses of processes and governance, as well as to identify and quantify optimization potential as part of a comprehensive process cost analysis.

Ultimately, your business processes also serve to provide services and products to your customers. It therefore makes sense for SSC to support you in evaluating and, if necessary, redefining your company-wide process and governance model. We make sure that your service center processes are consistently aligned with your business processes and that your company can leverage optimization potential across all areas. The industry experience of our consultants ranges from retail, finance and logistics to the energy, telecommunications and automotive industries; in particular, we advise companies in the SME sector.

Service center IT architecture - the foundation of operational excellence

Process optimization without suitable system support is unthinkable today. An IT shared service center will typically want to use application solutions to automate IT service management or IT financial management. However, it is often unclear how the requirements for supporting systems should be specified and how a potential provider should be selected internally or externally.

We therefore support you end-to-end in the RFP process - from the definition of a requirements specification to the creation of an RFP document and the identification and evaluation of providers. In this context, we also help you with overarching problems, such as embedding the service center IT architecture in the corporate IT architecture (strategic IT projects) or managing procedural and organizational changes that go hand in hand with the introduction of a tool. Here, the role of a controller can change permanently if the creation of controlling reports is automated using a tool instead of being carried out manually by analyzing Excel spreadsheets.

Cross-divisional business/IT transformations that need to be carried out as part of an SAP implementation, for example, are also within our area of expertise. Our support approaches here are explained in more detail in Transformation Management.