A shared service centre promises consistent processes and lower costs. The processes move, the new team is hired, go-live is in the calendar. What is easily overlooked: the knowledge the previous teams used to keep those processes running does not move automatically with them.
The consequences rarely show on day one; they show in the weeks after. According to Fraunhofer ISI, seven in ten relocations are reversed over quality problems, and knowledge transfer decides the business case.
Three questions per process
Not every process needs the same handover. Go through the processes that are due to move one by one and ask three questions in this order:
- Do the current sites run this process differently? Then go to the section on variants first.
- Are there cases that are regularly handled differently from what the process description says? Then go to the section on exceptions.
- Neither? Then the route for rule-based processes is enough.
The order matters. A process with site variants almost always has exceptions too, but those can only be captured sensibly once it is settled which variant will apply.
When every site works differently
Three plants, three ways of booking a complaint. Each has a reason, and each works locally. If the process moves into the shared service centre like that, the new team inherits all three variants and has to work out where each case comes from before handling it.
So a decision has to be made before the move: which variant applies in future, and which exceptions to it are deliberately kept. No project team can make that decision alone. It needs the people who own the variants today, and a named person who signs off the result. Harmonisation after go-live costs many times more, because operations have to keep running in parallel.
When exceptions define the process
This is where the biggest risk lies. The process description covers the standard case; the current case handlers know the deviations: the supplier whose invoices are always checked by hand, the customer with a special arrangement from a contract nobody can find any more.
This knowledge has to be secured while the people are still in the process. Targeted conversations that ask about concrete cases draw it out; an AI-led interview takes around 30 minutes of the expert’s time. In Omnora Intelligence Management this becomes approved knowledge the new team can access, in its own language where needed: voice-over and subtitles are available in more than 140 languages. How to plan the timing of the handover is covered in the article on nearshoring cut-over.
When it is a rule-based process
Clear rules, high volume, few exceptions: these processes are the best candidates for the first move. Clean documentation and short training are usually enough. Whether the new team can work from day one then depends mainly on whether the instructions are clear and in the right language. More on that in the article on runbooks in the local language.
The most common misclassification
A warning, because it often comes too late. Processes are sometimes classed as rule-based only because nobody asked about the exceptions. When in doubt, ask the person who has run the process longest about the last case that did not fit the pattern.
A shared service centre that starts with three ways of working is not a central centre.
It is a fourth plant.
