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How has RPA contributed to transforming Shared Services?

Outsourcing and Shared Services (OSS) were born from the need to lower costs and increase efficiency in organizations more than 40 years ago. However, as in many other industries, companies dedicated to OSS have had to reinvent themselves and take advantage of emerging technologies such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Computing to offer innovative models of added-value.

According to a study about the OSS industry, published by Deloitte & Touche (M.E.) in collaboration with Dubai Outsource City in 2019, the OSS global panorama looks promising. It’s estimated that in 2018, global spending in OSS services reached $688.4 billion dollars, representing an increase of more than 8% with respect to the year before. And in the next five years, it is estimated that the demand and market growth will be above 7.4% annually, which leads experts to predict that the OSS industry will exceed 1 trillion dollars in the next six years. Currently, it is estimated that 58.2% of OSS costs are from IT Outsourcing (ITO), 24.4% to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and 17.4% to Shared Services.

The difference between Outsourcing and Shared Services is subtle, but important. Outsourcing consists in hiring a specialized company to “perform certain tasks or functions, such as the day-to-day management and operation of IT assets and processes (e.g. IT support, IT networks), as well as business process outsourcing (BPO),” that normally aren’t a part of the core business, in addition to support functions, such as finance and accounting, human resources, customer and sales support. Shared Services traditionally involve centralizing administrative and BackOffice functions of an organization, such as finance and accounting, human resources, IT, and procurement.

According to a recent survey by Gartner, cited in the Deloitte’s study, RPA is the most adopted emerging technology after cloud computing: 48% of Shared Services organizations are evaluating adopting and using RPA, and 72% of Outsourcing organizations are considering or adopting RPA. The most important reasons for adopting this technology are improving performance, improving speed to market, reducing error, and streamlining.

The Deloitte surveys show that IT and Finance are the main users of RPA (87% and 83%), followed by Human Resources and Procurement (78% and 72%). Deloitte found that the levels of satisfaction in OSS companies that implemented RPA is more than 70%, which indicates the speed at which this technology has matured and how deeply it has been adopted globally.

These trends coincide completely with what Conciliac has found with its clients dedicated to Shared Services; they have all reported significant efficiency in performance, which translates to savings in time, costs, and resources dedicated to the task of reconciling information for their clients. And because Conciliac Recon Software is a dating matching tool designed and developed to automatically process reconciliation of financial and non-financial information or data (including reconciling text), Conciliac can perform complex automatization and reconciliation tasks such as:

  • Credit Cards
  • Bank Transactions
  • Commissions
  • Suppliers
  • Awards
  • Accounting
  • Flight tickets
  • Stocks
  • And more.

OSS suppliers need disruptive solutions that allow them to offer their customers services capable of complying with increasing laws and regulations, solve the ongoing challenge of data security and cybersecurity, and mitigate the risks that increasingly better levels of service and quality bring about. The transformation of the OSS industry wouldn’t make sense without strategic business partners like Conciliac, who provide scalable and reliable technology to keep up the pace.

Author: Conciliac Team

Reference:

“Outsourcing and Shared Services 2019-2023, Global, Middle East and UAE industry outlook”, Deloitte & Touche (M.E.) in collaboration with Dubai Outsource City, 2019
http://outsourcing-outlook.com/assets/pdf/Deloitte-DOC-Whitepaper_outsourcing-and-shared-services2019-2023.pdf

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