استراتژی های موثر برای برون سپاری داخلی و خارجی خدمات کسب و کار : بررسی تجربی

The growing pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency induces many organizations to undertake shared services initiatives. This consolidation and streamlining of common business functions is also known as insourcing, in-house services, business services, or staff services. While adoption of a shared service structure is viewed by many as an appropriate strategy to pursue, most companies still struggle to devise optimal strategies and to generate adequate returns on investments for their projects, because none of the approaches that are commonly adopted is recognized as universally effective. This paper builds upon the “structure-environment” perspective to uncover configurations of shared services organizations and to explain why and under what circumstances some of these configurations exhibit superior results. The conceptual model proposed challenges the notion of “best practice” and suggests that the effectiveness of a shared services project depends on the degree of complementarity between the “needs” arising from the environment in which a company operates and the specific capabilities developed to address these needs. The theoretical findings are validated empirically through the analysis of a large sample of European firms that recently undertook initiatives in this domain. Four dominant configurations of shared service organizations are uncovered, and their relationship to performance is explored.

Increasing competition, the progressive globalization of the economy caused by the lowering of trade barriers, and the emergence of new market players that benefit from significant labor cost advantages is pressuring western firms to devise strategies to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of operations. Among the various alternatives the development of shared services (SS) is increasingly regarded as a potential solution to this problem and is being progressively adopted by a growing number of firms. For example Citigroup has established Citigroup Business Services, a shared services organization located in three regional centers around the globe, dealing with financial reporting, payroll and benefits administration, purchasing, accounts payable, and premises management functions for the entire group. Shared services is the strategy of standardizing, streamlining, and consolidating common business functions and processes in an organization, in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness with both cost reduction and overall profitability in mind. According to Bywater (2001) it is: “The co-location of internal services which are removed from the business to whom they provide the service-internal outsourcing”. In a report by The Economist Intelligence Unit (1998), shared services are described as: “The apportioning of standardized and consolidated business functions or processes with a service mentality to ensure effective operation”. “Shared services – also known as insourcing, in-house services, business services, or staff services – is more than centralizing routine transactions: the idea is to leverage best practices, specialized knowledge, and technology to create satisfied internal and external customers” (The Conference Board, 1998). According to Goold et al. (2001) it is one of the roles that corporate headquarters can take.

SS needs dictate the appropriate SS model. Firms treating their SS as a cost center and adopting a monitoring based incubation model can perform quite well in small local firms that have not necessarily deployed integrated information technology. On the other hand, this approach seems to become too complex for firms with large operating scale, which offshore their SSO, and savings suffer as a consequence. The model that sets up the SSO as an independent business, focuses on revenues, and invests heavily, does not need SLAs to ensure service and benefits from large operating scale. Incentives are better aligned and the firm overcomes the problem of controlling a complex organization. The superior performance compared to smaller firms may be a result of maturity in terms of processes in such organizations, or the fact that there is more room for savings in large diverse organizations. Thus, unlike the common argument that suggests the superiority of a high market mentality we find that this is contingent on the environmental needs of the SSO. Similarly, we find no significant support for the common argument that as SSOs mature, they shift to a market-oriented model. SSOs of small local firms with centers in only a few countries, require fewer employees relative to the total number of employees in the firm. This suggests that such firms have more efficient SS operations compared to their highly complex multinational counterparts. Our results also demonstrate that in the sample, only about a quarter of the firms have a strong interest in offshoring. These are large multinational companies that do not outsource their SSO, but offshore it to a large number of different locations. This strategy seems to penalize firms in this cluster on the performance measures being considered. It seems that keeping the SSO in-house, multishoring, and adopting a monitoring type incubation model is not appropriate given the environmental needs of such firms. Albeit not significant, the offshoring seen in the focused adopters seems to provide a lower complexity setting where this strategy results in success. It would be an interesting topic of future research to test the hypothesis that complexity hurts the performance of this type of offshoring strategy. Our results need to be interpreted in light of the following caveat. Our data did not contain information that would allow us to evaluate more revenue and/or service-oriented performance measures. Such data could have shown us more precisely how each configuration rates on performance, and may have illustrated a tradeoff between savings and other performance metrics in some parts. This remains as the most important issue for future research.