Shared Services typically involves the consolidation of business support functions, such as HR or finance, from multiple departments or agencies into a single, stand-alone entity. This approach is particularly relevant to large government organisations (or across a federated set of “partner” organisations) with disparate HR functions looking to centralise their operations. Shared Service Centres, which provide the front line service to the rest of the organisation, present significant opportunities for government departments to introduce standard systems, best practice processes and real improvements in efficiency savings and customer service. Even where modern back office systems exist, it is typically the front-end platform in the Shared Service Centre that supports the real improvements in efficiency savings and customer service. 
Lagan’s Enterprise Case ManagementTM (ECMTM) offering enables an organisation to deliver efficiency gains and customer service improvements in its HR function, although the principles also apply to other government shared services such as finance and payroll. The Lagan shared service software supports the processes and functions required in an HR Shared Service Centre, providing an effective contact and case management ‘front end’ to an organisation’s back office HR systems. It enables agents in the Shared Service Centre to communicate in a structured and effective manner with employees and managers, exploiting seamless access to relevant data in the back office systems (such as SAP or Oracle) to aid resolution of queries. This frees up HR specialists’ time, enabling them to concentrate on value-added activities.
The Lagan solution has proven to be much quicker to implement and more flexible to change than Shared Service Centre products from the HR back office system vendors (and consequently has a much lower cost of ownership). Its flexible Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) means that it can work within government standards based IT infrastructures. Its powerful integration capabilities mean that it can connect to a variety of back office HR systems such as Oracle or SAP.
The Lagan ECM solution is being used by Transport for London (TfL), which oversees London’s buses, tubes, river services, Tramlink and DLR. After consolidating the HR services of 19 different businesses, TfL used Lagan ECM to achieve financial savings and to provide an improved HR service for its 20,000 employees, 80,000 pensioners and 60,000 contractors. TfL established a shared service centre and the Lagan solution, which was implemented in less than six months, was set up to support the case management activities of TfL’s 250 HR staff. The Lagan solution was integrated with TfL’s HR back office system from SAP. Cost savings of £8.1 million p.a. have resulted and ‘best in class’ service processes were implemented.
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