Guidelines for Shared Service Centers

Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications supports shared service centers in two ways. First, with business unit security, which allows your shared service centers personnel to process transactions for other business units called clients.

Second, the service provider model expands on this capability to allow a business unit and its personnel in a shared service center to work on transactions of the client business units. It is possible to view the clients of a service provider business unit, and to view service providers of a client business unit.

Your shared service centers provide services to your client business units that can be part of other legal entities. In such cases, your cross charges and recoveries are in the form of receivables invoices, and not merely allocations within your general ledger, thereby providing internal controls and preventing inappropriate processing.

For example, in traditional local operations, an invoice of one business unit can't be paid by a payment from another business unit. In contrast, in your shared service center environment, processes allowing one business unit to perform services for others, such as paying an invoice, are allowed and completed with the appropriate intercompany accounting. Shared service centers provide your users with access to the data of different business units and can comply with different local requirements.

Security

The setup of business units provides you with a powerful security construct by creating relationships between the functions your users can perform and the data they can process. This security model is appropriate in a business environment where local business units are solely responsible for managing all aspects of the finance and administration functions.

In Oracle Fusion applications, the business functions your business unit performs are evident in the user interface for setting up business units. To accommodate shared services, use business unit security to expand the relationship between functions and data. A user can have access to many business units. This is the core of your shared service architecture.

For example, you take orders in many businesses. Your orders are segregated by business unit. However, all of these orders are managed from a shared service order desk in an outsourcing environment by your users who have access to multiple business units.

Benefits

In summary, large, medium, and small enterprises benefit from implementing share service centers. Examples of functional areas where shared service centers are generally implemented include procurement, disbursement, collections, order management, and human resources. The advantages of deploying these shared service centers are the following:

• Reduce and consolidate the number of control points and variations in processes, mitigating the risk of error.

• Increase corporate compliance to local and international requirements, providing more efficient reporting.

• Implement standard business practices, ensuring consistency across the entire enterprise and conformity to corporate objectives.

• Establish global processes and accessibility to data, improving managerial reporting and analysis.

• Provide quick and efficient incorporation of new business units, decreasing start-up costs.

• Establish the correct balance of centralized and decentralized functions, improving decision making.

• Automate self-service processes, reducing administrative costs.

• Permit business units to concentrate on their core competencies, improving overall corporate profits.