Shared services functions – such as IT – can account for more than a third of an organisation's total costs. Effective costing and cross-charging are vital to successful performance management. But how can you help business units to make the right decisions about the use of shared services? What's the most cost-effective way to monitor, reforecast and realign resources and capacity?

Using our profitability and cost management solution, you can help business units to make informed decisions about their use of shared services, and provide your IT group with insight into the cost of individual services. As a result, you can better align and more efficiently cross-charge your IT shared-services costs.

More Accurate Costing and Cross-Charging

With the IT services costing solution from SAP BusinessObjects you can benefit from:

• Activity-based costing functionality specific to the needs of costing shared services
• 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 Alignment of Resources

The 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 optimisation 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 drive 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.