In an effort to drive down costs, an increasing number of organisations are moving to Shared Service Centres(SSC),particularly within the private sector. To find out how SSC may help your organisation visit Link text SSC Forum.

The immediate implication is that Finance and HR Departments will shrink so there will be fewer people who require training and that an eLearning solution may not be the right solution as its primary benefit is to train lots of disparate users, but this viewpoint does not take into account all the other "wins" with eLearning.

While it is true that eLearnings scalability and ease of distribution may not be the "deal clincher " for a SSC solution, some of the other plus-points make it an excellent alternative to old school training.

One of the key selling points of a SSC is the fact that "one Back Office for all" is serving many different organisations with standardised functions, but the business processes for interacting with these different customers may all be different and will in all likelihood change as businesses develop, so it is crucial that these processes are documented, standardised and easily maintained as they will have to be accessed by any member of the SSC operational team.

For example a typical SSC may deal with dozens of organisations, it is unlikely the same member of the SSC will deal exclusively with 1 particular organisation, so the operator my find themselves having to deal with numerous business scenarios, and as such will require quick and easy access to the appropriate current business processes. The operator may be using functionality and processes that are new to them and when you have Service level Agreements (SLA's) that have to be adhered to there is no time for mistakes or delays.

What of the external organisation which has now lost its Finance/HR subject matter experts? Having devolved its "Back Office" to an SSC it now has to communicate with the SSC using non-finance/HR staff who also require access to updated/current Standard Processes, they may have been trained (hopefully with eLearning) but are the processes current? Are they easily available? Are they consistent with the SSC? Are they new?

There maybe multiple organisations and it is important that they are all consistent in their dealings with the SSC, this too requires a managed information and training solution. If the SSC has to disseminate changes in procedure or functionality to all these organisations an eLearning solution is a far better option than the logistics in training multiple people from multiple locations and multiple organisations.

Dominic Galano , Project Manager and Functional Lead at iTrain Consulting, Fluent in Repost Manager, AR, AP, GL, PO, CE, FSG.

First published on Stratus Blog