Shared Services in numbers – Some Benchmarks from Solvay Shared Services

In this interview with Guy Mercier, General Management - Director Geral & Gerente at Solvay Shared Services, he shared with us his proudest accomplishments within Shared Services and how it’s affected his business.

What are your most proud accomplishments within Shared Services?  How did it affect your business?

• In a bit more than 5 years we built, fully “in-house” and with only 6 expatriates, a multi-functions Finance & a HR well matured SSO with 2 centers, one in Lisbon (with 220 FTEs) and one in Curitiba Brazil (60 FTEs) and a financial hub under study in Bangkok, to serve more than 150 Solvay affiliates in 17 different languages from one single SAP-ERP platform supported by some specific IT tools (like IVR, Ticketing systems, Knowledge Management...)
• We processed in 2010 2.293.499 transactions (1.7 M in Finance and 0.5 M in HR Payroll and data maintenance) and received only 2.394 customer complaints delivering more than 99% service level in compliance with SLA
• We are certified ISO 9001-2008 in our Lisbon center and now in Curitiba and put in place a fully integrated Continuous Improvement plan data-base to link all corrective-preventive, innovation and process development actions.
• We have a career plan and strategic training individual development plan for all our employees. At each level, from operator to manager, they are motived and appraised through individual EPDA  sessions with their direct supervisor twice a year, linking their objectives with the strategic company objectives.
On a quartely basis the company performances is measured and communicated based on a balanced scorecard with 17 KPIs detaileld by process.
• We received 68,2% “good to very good” feedback from our customer based on a survey we launched systematically twice a year (rising from 66% last year).
• We are now at the center of the Solvay Group business transformation with one global objective which is to extend further the scope and the geographical coverage of our 3S shared services model within Finance by putting in place an added-value higher expertise finance middle-office unit and in HR by developing a single point of contact for all employee e-services.

What are your plans for 2011/2012?
• Business transformation through process redesign & further automation and geographical expansion in ASIA

3S Solvay Shared Services-Sociedade de Servicios Partilhados Lda, is the new European services center of Solvay group for Finance and Human Ressources based in Lisbon and in Curitiba serving with a total of 290 employees more than 150 Solvay companies in 17 different countries.  It is a member of the worldwide Solvay S.A. chemical and plastics group headquartered in Brussels, generating 8,485 m Euros sales in 2009 (60% in Europe, 28% in Americas, 10% in Asia) with more than 19,000 employees.

Guy Mercier will be giving a presentation about Cloud Computing for SSO at the Shared Services Woche 2011 in Berlin, Germany. Visit the website for more information.