shared service center (outsourcing) (SSC)

Shared Service Center (SSC) is an outsourcing strategy in which many business units of a company hand over standardized routine activities to a central service center.

Through the outsourcing strategy, the distributed units of an organization use the services offered by the shared service center, such as cost, personnel and travel accounting. The outsourced service centers, in which employees of the parent company work, compete with external providers and must offer their services in accordance with the relevant market conditions, i.e., taking into account the standard market service level agreements(SLAs). These include, for example, the availability ofservices and response times in the event of a fault.

The advantage of shared service centers lies in the cost savings, as they can offer the same services to several departments. The difference to Business Process Outsourcing( BPO) is that SSCs are departments of the company, while BPOs are independent service providers independent of the company.