The Challenge
Shared services functions — such as IT — can account for more than a third of an organization's total costs. Effective costing and cross-charging are vital to successful performance management. But how can you help business units make the right decisions about shared-services use? What's the most cost-effective way to monitor, reforecast, and realign resources and capacity?
You need to:
- Help business units make informed decisions about their use of shared services
- Provide IT with insight into the cost of individual services
Activity-based costing (ABC) and driver-based budgeting (DBB) methodologies can help you establish better alignment and efficient cross-charging of your IT shared services costs.
More Accurate Costing and Cross-Charging
Our IT Services Costing solution provides:
- Activity-based costing functionality specific to the needs of costing shared services. Learn more about Activity Analysis.
- Flexible cross-charging and cost recovery
- Automatic chargeback mechanisms with invoice distribution showing full-cost breakdowns by department or business unit, so internal customers know what they are being charged for
- Ability to report to ITIL and other standard IT services directories
Better Resource Alignment
Effective management of shared services goes beyond better costing. It's also about frequently realigning the resources and capacity of shared services functions to meet the needs of the business.
When linked to our Performance Optimization solution, IT Services Costing streamlines the planning and budgeting processes, so you can make regular forecasts and keep business units updated with the data that drives shared-services demand. By enabling department managers to engage in meaningful discussions, shared services functions can constantly fine-tune resources to meet the changing needs of their internal customers, helping align IT capacity with business unit requirements.
