BeeOffice for shared service centers

Organizations establish shared service centers (SSC) in order to reduce the costs of finance, HR and IT services in a company. Services transferred to SSC, previously performed in a “distributed" form in many departments or different companies, are centralized. As a result, you can expect the reduction of costs (elimination of duplicating tasks and positions, more effective solutions at a higher scale of operations) and also better quality and higher efficiency of work (organization of procedures, standardization, implementation of best practices).

BeeOffice is a system that automates and organizes a number of typical administrative processes carried out in every organization. Leave absences, business trip accounting, acceptance of expenses and more than a dozen other features may be supported in BeeOffice by transparent web forms and automated workflow, instead of the “traditional” paper forms, Excel spreadsheets, and an overload of e-mails. In this article, we will focus on the applications and benefits that can be brought by BeeOffice in a shared service center.

Regardless of whether the company only plans to create SSC or if it has been operating for a long time already, the following general model of continuous improvement of such organization can be depicted:

• Collecting data on the flow of processes;
• Elimination of activities that can be fully automated;
• Simplification and reduction of lead time of other activities.

What exactly is happening in SSC?

If you can measure the processes at SSC, it is much easier to manage them. Workflow systems for handling administrative requests, such as BeeOffice, allow for each process to be evaluated according to many criteria, for example:

• a division of various kinds of tasks by category (e.g. leaves of absence, business trips, HR requests, or, going further: domestic/international trips related to booking of tickets or handled by an employee himself etc.);
• a number of requests in each category that is received during a day, a week, a month;
• duration of handling a single request – both the average duration throughout the organization, as well as by types of requests or the source of their origin.

Based on the information on the number of individual tasks and the pace at which they arrive at SSC, you can make rational decisions about staffing of various positions of the center (depending on the number of requests and tasks that are received at a given period). For example, the workflow statistics can show a characteristic “seasonality” of various processes. If an overload of business trips or PIT forms to be processed repeats itself at certain intervals, you should shift people dealing with other matters to handle these priority tasks.

Using the information about the minimum/average/maximum processing time of individual requests, you can make decisions about training for specific user groups or focus on improving the description of the procedure. A sales team from the region X usually sends its business trip reports after the deadline? Processing of business trip reports of the Y team usually takes longer than in the case of other employees? Such information helps quickly identify problem areas and improve effectiveness of operation.

Another important aspect of registering tasks performed by SSC employees is the allocation of costs of the center – to individual departments or companies in a group of companies. SSC costs are usually reinvoiced to other entities within the group. Sometimes centers provide services also for other entities outside their own group.

When handling administrative processes in BeeOffice, you can easily determine how many tasks of each type were completed in a given month for each SSC customer and use this data as a basis for precise calculation of fees.

Which activities can be eliminated?

The ideal way to streamline an administrative activity (in terms of the productivity of SSC) will be… to eliminate it completely. The systems like BeeOffice are often referred to as “employee and manager self-service" since they completely relieve the company’s administrative departments of certain tasks.

Do employees often ask the HR team how many leave days they are still entitled to take by the end of the year? Do superiors ask how many leave days in total are still to be taken by their subordinates?

Do employees ask when they are to receive a reimbursement of travel costs? Or do managers ask for a report on travel costs of their team for a previous month, per person, country and means of transportation?

The handling of these and dozens of other queries can be eliminated from SSC by providing employees with access to an account in BeeOffice. Here everyone checks his/her leave quota or the approval status of each request. The superior can view both his/her own requests, as well as those of his/her subordinates (e.g. in the form of a report on travel costs or other expenses).

As a result, on the one hand you relieve SSC of responding to repetitive e-mails or phone calls (in a large organization this may translate into full-time jobs in a month), and at the same time you increase the satisfaction of employees, who receive the answers to such questions immediately, at any time of the day, at any place where they have access to the Internet.

Which activities can be improved?

What has been measured and cannot be eliminated, may be further analyzed and improved. It is not necessary to introduce many new functions or changes at the same time (then the barrier of learning how to use a new system may result in a temporary decrease in the productivity of SSC, instead of the expected improvement). A good idea might be to gradually simplify or automate individual areas.

Is the determination of a business travel allowance for an employee time-consuming and entails a risk of error? BeeOffice has a built-in automatic mechanism for the calculation of travel allowances and other lump sums on the basis of specified destinations, a date/time of crossing the border, a number of kilometers traveled by a private car, or other indicators.

Is an update of exchange rates (for the conversion of certain expenses) tedious and time-consuming? BeeOffice automatically retrieves daily average exchange rates from the National Bank of Poland table and uses them to convert amounts.

Do employees forget to collect from superiors necessary approvals of their requests? The solution automatically directs a workflow process to the right person, on the basis of the employee’s position (who is his/her superior?), or the characteristics of the document (e.g. expense reports above PLN 3,000 require an additional approval by a financial director).

Are superiors delaying the approval of requests addressed to them, for example forget to check the status in the workflow system? BeeOffice can both send notifications about new requests that have been just received from an employee, as well as monitor the outstanding issues according to established criteria (e.g. leave requests not approved by the 10th day of the month for a specific month result in sending reminders to both an employee and his/her superior).

Finally, another typical corporate scenario: nervous searching for a person “who substitutes for the manager X during his vacation?”. In BeeOffice you can easily designate a substitute (one or many) during a vacation or other absence. Such a person is temporarily granted the authorizations of an absent employee and becomes the recipient of notifications about requests to be approved.

What are other capabilities of BeeOffice?

BeeOffice provides a lot of user friendly and intuitive features, ready for fast deployment. However, if a standard set of modules does not meet specific customer requirements, the flexible architecture of the application enables quick preparation of a dedicated solution that fully meets the expectations of a company. Shared service centers looking for IT solutions that automate business processes will find in BeeOffice a tailor-made solution.