Balanced Scorecard application in shared service centers

Abstract

There’s turbulence in the market that doesn’t make the job of keeping a company working profitably easy. The hardship increases if the precious resources that are available are not properly allocated. When we reach support services, like finance, these resources should be the least possible, in order to reduce the overhead on sales of the core business product or service. The immediate idea of shared services is that they exist to reduce costs, supported by core business units, which means the investment made on these units must be maximized, in order to maintain its importance in any companies’ strategy, and to justify its existence. But it’s more than that: although it may be so at start, there is room for evolution, going from cost-reduction to excellence centres in the long-term. From cost to excellence, it is important to have a good measure of business: if it’s going in the right direction, if the resources are properly allocated, if there is waste…and this is where the Balanced Scorecard can step in: to assist in the measuring, to enlighten decision-makers and help plan the future, while understanding the present. My dissertation is about the deployment of the Balanced Scorecard framework to a Shared Service organization, by presenting a case study where you can see the positive and negative impacts a Balanced Scorecard can bring.