As organizations struggle to create and sustain shareholder value, executives are continually challenged to deliver effective business processes. In particular, organizations and CFOs are faced with the triple challenges of

• creating a finance and administration organization that adds value
• deploying consistent high quality global e-business processes
• providing business transaction processing at increasingly low unit costs (typically at less than 0.5% of total revenue).

The market in which companies operate is characterized by globalization, mergers, acquisitions and consolidation requiring companies to standardize operations to stay competitive. An effective way of keeping costs down and improving efficiency is by moving certain functions to one central location. Centralization is only half the story. An increasingly popular and effective way to meet this challenge and achieve sustainable benefits is for companies to set up a shared services centre.

CODA and Shared Services

CODA has a 25-year history of helping medium and large organizations around the world to improve their financial processes, automate operations and deliver greater value. CODA’s international finance application, Financials, is specifically designed for single-instance implementations. It offers world-class multicompany, multi-lingual and multi-currency support within a single version of the application, allowing it to accommodate the multiple legislative and cultural differences inherent in running different national companies within the same system.

An unrivalled account code structure with up to 8 dimensions allows CODA to cope easily with multiple corporate and reporting structures, and give ultimate flexibility. A full browser-based interface allows users to use and administer the finance system from any location.

This design, combined with its unified single ledger approach, makes CODA an ideal partner for Shared Services. Amongst CODA’s 2500 clients are a whole spectrum of examples of those that have implemented Financials as the basis for Pan-European and global shared services. Some have opted for centralized implementation as a path to outsourcing of core administrative functions, whilst others have managed their applications centrally with international roll-out to support core business processes, remote operations and business partners more effectively and cheaply.

Here is a selection of recent reports, white papers and releases covering the issues and recent developments in the field of Shared Services.