What tools can you use to run a service catalog for accounting and an SSC?

Use a shared catalog on a company-wide portal, the approach enterprise service management (ESM) systems take. You need one if your shared services center (SSC) combines several functions or serves several group companies: each company sees its own set of services, and statistics for all services are collected in one format. How to choose a system for the accounting requests themselves is covered in the answer on software for employee requests to accounting; this answer is only about the catalog.

Where companies keep the catalog

• A document or spreadsheet on the intranet. Anyone with access can edit it, and after six months there are several versions. A document can't tell you how often each service was requested, so nothing ever gets removed from it.
• A catalog in a tool for one department or for the SSC. Services, forms, and their statistics are in one place, and the department edits the catalog itself. But IT and facilities have catalogs of their own, and the employee has to figure out where to look for a service.
• A business process management (BPM) system or a document management system with request forms. The process is configured for the task. This fits when routes are complex and tied to documents, but there is no single catalog where employees pick a service.
• A shared catalog on an ESM platform, such as SimpleOne ESM. Each SSC function and each department has its own section with its own owner, and the employee looks for a service in one place.

What happens without a single catalog is visible in the story of ITG Corporation. Before its service transformation, each company in the group had its own service units working under different rules, and employees didn't understand where to go with different requests.

What an SSC should look for

• Visibility by company and department. An SSC that serves several group companies shows each one only its own services and forms. This matters in setups like ITG Corporation's, where one service hub provides legal, accounting, and financial support to all group companies, including international ones.
• Statistics for each service: how many requests it gets and how often its due date is at risk. Without them, you can't review the catalog: it's unclear what to merge and what to remove.
• The catalog is a place to order, not a reference list. From the service description, the employee opens the request form right away instead of looking for where to write. A request from the catalog goes straight to the work group that handles it.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Any department in it is a service provider. How the catalog is structured:

• the catalog is built from categories with nested subcategories and from services with forms;
• one service category can belong to several catalogs at once;
• visibility of categories and services is configured by user criteria: some employees are allowed to see them, others are not;
• tasks are assigned automatically based on workload, due dates are set in service level agreements (SLAs), and indicators warn in advance about a possible breach;
• department metrics are shown on traffic-light scorecards.

If the company already uses SimpleOne ITSM, the IT service management system, SSC services appear on the same portal where employees submit IT requests.

How to compile the list of services and name them in the employee's words is covered in the answer on building a service catalog for accounting and an SSC. See how an accounting catalog looks in the system on the accounting request portal page.