Shared Services Center: 1 year old and 'continuously improving'

by Dave Jones
February 08, 2013

Throughout the two-plus years of planning for the Davis campus’s Shared Services Center, one phrase kept repeating: “continuous improvement.”

That is, officials said, the center would continually refine and streamline campus business processes to save time and money — at this stage, an estimated $4 million annually.

The center, which next week celebrates its one-year anniversary, is continually improving, too, by listening to its clients. Early on, the center established a customer advisory committee (it meets every two weeks), and, throughout the last year, center staff held more than 100 partnership meetings across campus “to capture specific issues and develop follow-up action plans,” said Andrew Dunn, the center’s director.

As a result, the frustration that comes with a major transition like this one — moving to shared services — has begun to erode. “It’s the first step that’s always the hardest,” said Karen Hull, associate vice chancellor for Organizational Excellence, who led the planning for and launched the center.

She praised the center staff — 65 career positions plus six long-term appointments — for a job very well done in Year 1. “They have a lot to be recognized for and to be proud of,” she said.

Dunn added: “Our move to a shared services structure is a testament to the commitment of our exceptional staff to improve the service delivery of our administrative departments, thus enabling savings to be directed toward our larger mission of education, research and public service.”

'Growing pains'

John Gregg, director of controls and accountability in Accounting and Financial Services, cited the dedication of the Shared Services Center team — dedication that “has helped them overcome the growing pains that come with procedure changes of this magnitude.”

Gregg, who participated in the center’s workflow design and has worked with Dunn and his team since then, said the center is working “efficiently and correctly with the appropriate internal controls in place.”

The center opened on Valentine’s Day 2012 and today handles selected payroll, finance and human resources functions for more than 250 departments and 6,200 staff and student employees in six administrative units: Administrative and Resource Management; Offices of the Chancellor and Provost; Development and Alumni Relations; Information and Educational Technology; Office of Research (excluding the organized research units); and Student Affairs. (There are no plans to bring academic units into the center).

From Feb. 14 to Dec. 31, the center racked up the following numbers:

• 94,500 paychecks processed.

• 53,000 other payroll transactions, purchases, accounts payable, and travel and entertainment reimbursements, plus human resources actions.

• 3,015 requests dealing with staff and student hiring, transfers and promotions. A hiring action might include “onboarding,” i.e., filling out paperwork, etc., if the employee is new to UC Davis.

• 37 mass-hiring events (most of them dealing with student employees, say, the dozens who start their jobs at the beginning of the academic year or the beginning of every quarter, notably in Campus Recreation and Unions).

While all this was going on, the Shared Services Center partnered with the TRS Project Committee in migrating Shared Services Center clients into the new Time and Reporting System (still in process).

The center also built a case management system, and, because “continuous improvement” never stops, look for a client reporting package in March — a system that will enable clients to run reports on an ad-hoc basis or schedule.

Also, the center continues to work with its clients and central units, and with Hull’s Organizational Excellence team, to further identify “pain points” and process redundancies, and more opportunity for improvement.

A model for others

Dunn said the Shared Services Center, by taking away administrative work, enables departments to spend more time focusing on their core objectives. In turn, the center focuses on its core objective: doing the administrative work more effectively and efficiently.

It accomplishes this with – that’s right – “continuous improvement,” and by assigning the work, accounts payable, for example, to people whose core competency is in accounts payable.

In planning for the Shared Services Center, Hull and other campus leaders visited schools around the country where such centers had been established. Now, Dunn is telling the UC Davis story in talks at conferences, and other schools and government institutions are coming to see the Davis center.

Visitors so far from outside the UC system: North Carolina State University, State University of New York at Canton, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and the state of California’s Department of General Services.

UC Davis has received inquiries from more than a half-dozen other schools, including the universities of Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky and Washington.

The UC system is also checking out the Shared Services Center, with visits so far by the Office of the President (Business Resource Center and Information Technology Services), the San Diego campus and UC San Diego Health Systems.

And, of course, the UCPath Project — under which a systemwide shared services center is being developed (to be housed on the Riverside campus). The UC Davis Shared Services Center will be involved in the campus’s integration with UCPath in 2014 and 2015, creating yet another opportunity for even more “continuous improvement.”