Book excerpt: As organisations struggle to create and sustain shareholder value, executives are continually challenged to deliver effective business processes. Increasingly today's market requires companies to standardise operations in order to remain competitive. And, an effective way of keeping costs down and improving efficiency is by moving certain functions to one central location. An increasingly popular and effective way of meeting this challenge is to establish a shared service centre. This briefing explains how and why more and more organisations are turning to shared services solutions. It explains how organisations can tap into the wealth of opportunities that shared services provides by clearly outlining processes for evaluation, planning and implementation. It examines the structural diversity of shared service centres and the role that good centre design plays in the quest for really effective shared services. Shared Service Centresconsiders the face of shared services today and tomorrow - and looks at the challenges posed by the market place, increased outsourcing, and the consulting boom. Providing practical, experience-driven examples and offering sample presentations, tools and templates for immediate use, this briefing offers expert advice on the process, tools, design and implementation of shared service centres. Essential reading for those considering implementing SSCs, as well as those interested in revamping existing SSC operations. This briefing will help you to: understand the shared services approach explore the strategic issues that inform the SSC decision become familiar with the management, technological, and process challenges develop a unique methodology or framework to support SSC deployment deploy a shared services culture which supports sustainable value creation employ best practice processes and systems investigate the opportunities for e-shared services and business process outsourcing