Satisfied with the performance of your CSP Achat?

One shared service center EAnd often also a profit center.
Are the objectives of CSP Achats in line with those of its customers? The contractual relationship is more difficult to implement when it comes to entities of the same company.

Is it enough to set up a contract? We must also think about the relationship between services, between people. Yesterday “colleagues” — today “customer — supplier” The change is not trivial.

Findings and recommendations

The transformation of a Support function, by setting up a shared services center or “CSP” is significantly changing the relationships between actors. A customer-supplier relationship must be established.

In the case of a outsourcing, the performance of a service center is managed by a contract, with performance requirements generally in the form of a SLA — Service Level Agreement.
It is rare to see the same level of formalism between entities of the same company when it comes to internal CSPs. Indeed, we hesitate to set up contracts, we say to ourselves “there is no reason why it should not work well between us”.

However, we often hear aboutdissatisfactions concerning these CSPs. Long deadlines, lack of responsiveness, complicated processes...

Of course, both aspects of managing a CSP are necessary: governance and transformation successful. The CSP can be created for several reasons:

• improving productivity through standardization of processes,
• cost reduction,
• compliance with a regulation...

In any case the stakeholders need to understand why we are implementing this change as well as the intended objectives.

Management transparency is important.
As in any customer-supplier relationship, management transparency is important. Expectations on both sides need to be clear.

For the outsourcing a service contract will be put in place, including the development of an “SLA” — Service Level Agreement — to define customer expectations and the expected level of performance. A CSP is also expected to provide a service at least equivalent to one that would come from an external service provider, because the challenges are the same and he also benefits from a perfect knowledge of his “customer”. This is in a way a prerequisite and it will be considered that there is no need to require any written commitment from him.

We know that the service of a CSP Achats is not always there. When asked about their level of satisfaction with the service, the staff in charge of monitoring the relationship with this internal provider observe that they did not no means of pressure real about what a customer base is, in essence, captivating. In addition, a dependency relationship has been created. So you have to draw up an agreement defining precisely what is expected of the CSP. The relationship is not that of a customer with respect to its supplier.

It is also and above all a relationship that unites companies between them, or of an IT group with respect to its members, benefiting from the human resources that have been transferred or delegated to it.

Service Level Agreements

Service level agreements must therefore be reinvented to take account of this Double reality : a customer/supplier relationship but within the “family home”.

While contractual reflexes are quite similar on paper, we are dealing with two very distinct realities. Most of the time, it would not occur to users of the services provided by a CSP to claim penalties from a structure of which their employer is a member and whose amount would be distributed among all its members via the contribution of each to the operating expenses of the CSP. The fact remains that they have in common, the desire to entrust a third party with the task of managing support activities “in its place”, to take advantage of the economies of scale linked to the sharing of the underlying technical platform, but while remaining “at home” within the group. On a contractual level, we should therefore find what characterizes most outsourcing contracts, namely: engagements in terms of quality and continuity of services as well as details on the level of security put in place for Ensuring confidentiality data and that of the entire information system.

What do you do when you want to express dissatisfaction with one of your family members? We start by telling him. For this, it remains important to offer metrics capable of measuring the level of quality sought in order to base a judgment on objective criteria. On the other hand, the real driver for maintaining the quality of service should, in the case of the CSP, Achats place people at the heart of concerns, much more than exclusively financial considerations.

The advantage of belonging to the same group is, in principle, to better understand the constraints of the CSP Achats client company and the value derived from outsourcing a service within a CSP. It is then all the easier to develop a “scorecard” based on the group's priorities to note the performance of the Purchasing CSP. It is therefore imbued with pragmatism that one must venture into the drafting of a CSP contract and not give in to the temptation to simply copy an outsourcing contract or to do without any agreement. Enjoying a happy marriage after signing a property separation agreement is thankfully not an exceptional situation!