Recently, I was meeting with a client after performing an assessment on their back office operations. Unfortunately, the assessment highlighted a number of areas where the company was significantly under-performing when compared to industry benchmarks. The company’s head of the shared services organization sat stiffly as I, as gently as possible, relayed the details of our assessment and proposed major changes to their organization.

Shared Services and Outsourcing models are no longer just for Global Fortune 500 companies. Today, we see an ever-increasing interest from middle-market organizations (companies ranging in revenue size from $200M-$2B) to reduce their back office costs and improve productivity and performance. More than ever, outsourcing is being viewed as one of the best ways to achieve these improvements, creating a new kind of shared services operation for these smaller organizations. In addition, if you are a larger organization and have still not considered shared services and/or outsourcing, you are late in the game.

If you have ever worked in a restaurant or owned one, you are probably well aware of the fact that profit margins can be extremely low. 

In reality, good employees don’t turn, “bad”, but in a lot of cases, they can outgrow the roles that they are performing in your organization.  Employee tenure, without professional growth and development, can hurt an organization, both financially as well as operationally.  And you’re not doing your employee any favor either, if he or she is doing the same job for many, many years.

There's no question about it - today's customers are more demanding than ever.  With an ever-increasing number of channels becoming available to research, compare prices, find deals, purchase, receive and return products and services, retailers must not only deploy the technologies to support an omnichannel world, but deliver the best customer service possible.

If the cloud is not on your roadmap, it should be. While server sales are falling flat, the cloud market is booming. In fact, Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud market alone will grow 17.2 percent in 2016 to $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015. Of that, the highest growth will come from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), with the firm estimating a jump in sales of 42.8 percent in 2016.  Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is also expected to grow significantly in 2016 - at a rate of 21.7 percent - to reach $38.9 billion.  With these staggering projections, as well as the fact that Amazon AWS reported 2015 sales of $7.88 billion in 2015, cloud is something no business can afford to ignore.

In today's cloudy and hyper-connected world, IT executives are being tasked to do more in the face of ever-shrinking IT budgets. 

In an increasingly omnichannel world, customers have a wide variety of channels to choose from when making purchases. Thanks to Amazon and other ecommerce innovators, those same customers also expect to receive their purchases almost instantaneously, regardless of what channel they are accessing. To illustrate this change in demand, a recent report by Technavio estimates that the market for same-day delivery in the US will hit $987 million by 2019.  Today's customers are also increasingly opting for the buy online and pick up in-store option, with 82 percent of respondents of a recent Temando survey stating so.

 I recently attended a conference on shared services, and throughout the 3 days, there were multiple sessions focused on the millennial workforce: hiring them, motivating them, retaining them, and developing them. 

A recent study published by Auxis, A Deeper Exploration of Shared Services in Latin America, provides some insights into the opportunities for performance improvement that exist in Shared Service Centers.

It seems like you can’t log into the Internet without being bombarded with proclamations about new business technologies solutions that are streamlining and improving back office processing across the globe.  Apparently, Skynet isn’t only planning the destruction of mankind; it’s also processing and paying your invoices.

 Latin America is rich in opportunities, from growing market reach to rationalizing operating costs, but these opportunities are not exempt from related challenges.

Latin America is rich in opportunities, from growing market reach to rationalizing operating costs, but these opportunities are not exempt from related challenges.

Auxis CEO, Raul Vega chaired the 10^th Annual Shared Services and Outsourcing Week Latin America from August 22^nd to August 24^th in Coconut Grove, FL.

 Latin America is rich in opportunities, from growing market reach to rationalizing operating costs, but these opportunities are not exempt from related challenges.

 Latin America is rich in opportunities, from growing market reach to rationalizing operating costs, but it is a region that also presents challenges.

Technology is at the heart of everything your business does, even if you don’t realize it.  In fact, in just the last minute, there were over 149 million emails sent, 66,600 Tumblr posts, 431,000 Tweets, 125,940 Skype calls, 43,000 Instagram uploads and over three million Google searches amounting to over two million GB of internet traffic.

In my previous blog post, I let you in on the “big secret” that larger enterprises use to help them get more value out of their back office operations.

When companies begin to develop their Global Business Services (“GBS”) strategy, the first question that typically comes up is, “What locations will provide the most value?”

 The complexity of any organization’s operating model is heavily influenced by the environment in which it conducts business.