Thought Piece

From a corporate and individual department point of view it makes sense to hand work over to a shared service and get back the required outcome, properly done and for a lower price than by running disparate teams, yet shared services often meet strenuous resistance from business and finance teams.

The resistance, which tends to be dogged and passive, goes beyond considerations of value for money. Rarely stated and perhaps even unconscious, the opposition has three elements.

First, there are legitimate questions around trust: the finance team has to be convinced that the shared service really can deliver and provide value for money.

But the other two reasons are more concerned with social issues and status than anything else. Let's be frank: the finance department is a great place to work, full of lively professionals, many of whom want to play hard as well as work hard. We all know life-long relationships can be formed across the ledgers. But that's a bit harder to achieve when the bulk of the finance team has moved elsewhere, often to some far-flung outpost. And even if the shared service is near at hand, you're not with them on a daily basis. The Christmas office party will not be the riotous occasion it once was.

The final reason for resisting goes to the very heart of the finance role: when the SSC does much of the work, what is actually left behind in terms of decision-making? Many elements of accounting involve judgement, such as bad debt provision. You can treat creating the provision as a mechanical exercise, or you can use the experience of being close to the business to inform your decision. What, for example, is the forward-looking information, such as the sales pipeline, telling you? What is your view of your market or the economy in general? Those views can have a material impact on the provision.

If FDs are deprived of their ability to use their experience to finesse the accounts, to make those material decisions, what is the result?

And what happens when the MD goes to the FD and asks for some legitimate adjustment and the FD replies 'sorry, my hands are tied by the SSC'? The reality is that those two senior figures have had responsibility removed from them. It has been suggested to me (and it's not a view I automatically share) that an FD who is not called on to set the results is in reality a financial analyst and that an MD without a proper FD is merely a commercial director. It's a harsh comment but it may explain why SSCs sometime seem to cause so much pain.

By the way, in case you are wondering, bees can fly because they beat their wings so fast, some 230 times a second when hovering. When carrying heavy loads they maintain that beat while stretching out their wing stroke amplitude.

Banks are not charities. But they do calculate the lifetime value of the customer and they understand the reputational risk to themselves of the slash and burn exercises they are sometimes accused of.

That brings us to the role of the banks, so often the largest creditor and certainly the one with the most intimate knowledge of how a company is faring. We all love a stereotype and the heartless, faceless bank pulling the plug on sound businesses over a minor blip sits deep in the business consciousness. But not all banks fit this caricature. "We want to work with management of a business facing difficulties to help identify the issues and provide solutions to get them back on track," says a senior manager with a leading retail bank. "We can make the most impact when the problems are identified early. We are keen for management to be open with us."

Banks are not charities. But they do calculate the lifetime value of the customer and they understand the reputational risk to themselves of the slash and burn exercises they are sometimes accused of. Most solutions to business difficulties involve access to more funds and/or different products (hedging, leasing, factoring) and that all adds up to continued and profitable involvement for the bank.

A Repositioning Turnaround may mean divestment of a troublesome subsidiary. It may mean embarking on (yet another) cost-cutting exercise, including turning away revenue opportunities if they are not of a sufficiently high margin. It most certainly involves a first step of getting an impartial and pragmatic overview of what the problem actually is, from Turnaround Professionals who also know the kind of language with which to talk to banks. The moment you take this kind of decisive action, you're likely to discover that there's no crisis, no drama, only urgent action that must start now.

Peter Charles 2010