Shared services: cutting costs without losing quality
Concentrating specialised skills in an external partner lets you reduce fixed costs and free your team for what really makes the business grow.
By Cristalizar Team · · 2 min read
Travel, archives, purchasing, communication, construction: every company needs these functions, but few make them their core business. Keeping a dedicated in-house team for each one is expensive and hard to justify. This is where shared services come in.
What shared services are
In a shared services model, several companies use the same structure of specialists for functions that are not part of their core. Instead of each organisation recruiting, training and maintaining its own team for each area, resources are concentrated in one partner and shared.
The result is simple: the company has access to the skills it needs, when it needs them, without carrying the fixed structure that usually comes with them.
Why they reduce costs
The shared services model pools resources. When the same team serves several organisations, the cost of maintaining it no longer falls on just one. In practice, this means:
- Lower fixed costs for recruitment, training and internal structure.
- Paying for the service you actually need, not for idle capacity.
- No duplication of functions between departments that often do the same work in parallel.
Specialists, without bringing them in-house
Cutting costs cannot mean losing quality. A shared services partner brings together professionals with specific experience in each area — know-how that would be difficult and slow to build in-house.
Make operations more effective, with access to recognised specialists, without having to bring them in-house.
For your team, this means less time on support tasks and more time for clients, products and the decisions that make a difference.
Where to start
The transition does not have to happen all at once. A good starting point:
- Identify the tasks that take up your team's time but are not part of the core business.
- Assess what they cost today — in people, time and scattered suppliers.
- Define what you expect from a partner: scope, service levels and how progress is tracked.
- Ask for a proposal and compare it with your current operation.
At Cristalizar we always start with an assessment: we listen to your company's needs and identify the areas to optimise, before presenting a tailored solution.