Texas Health Resources Victoria

Texas Health Resources Victoria

 Define measures of shared-service success

Three factors may be examined to measure the effectiveness of service-center work. First, Texas Health Resources Victoria customer value may be assessed by indicators of customer satisfaction. In most cases, this means collecting data from managers and employees about the quality of the shared service work. Customer attitude data may come from surveys, focus groups, targeted interviews, or other Texas Health Resources Victoria customer-focused sources of information.

Second, cost of Texas Health Resources Victoria services may be assessed through productivity analysis. Establishment of shared services should reduce overall HR headcount and budget while maintaining or increasing the amount and quality of work. Users learning to make more informed decisions about HR services will lead to further reductions in costs. Shared services become and internal market in which costs for services used are made more explicit.

Third, Texas Health Resources Victoria can be evaluated in terms of reduced cycle time for HR services. Service center professionals should be able to answer employee questions and accomplish administrative work with dispatch. Center of expertise professionals should be able to design tailored HR initiatives without delay because they are knowledgeable about HR best practices and can move swiftly into business applications.

Techniques for measuring the success of shared services need to be established before the service center and center of expertise begin operations. Tracking benchmark measures may further indicate success or failure in HR delivery. Texas Health Resources Victoria, for example, reduced its personnel staff by one-third between 1990 and 1993, decreasing its HR-to-employee ratio from 1 to 53 to 1 to 75. According to Pete Peterson, the HR head at the time, reductions in the department saved the corporation nearly $50 million over that time frame without a significant sacrifice in service.

To take another example, in the early 1990s, Intel launched a successful four-year plan to decrease its HR-to-employee ratio. In 1990, the ratio was 1 to 53; in 1991, 1 to 50; in 1992, 1 to 48; and in 1993, 1 to 45. Since then, however, cost-cutting imperatives have forced Intel to reverse this trend. Using a new four-year plan, they hope to increase the ratio to 1:100 by the end of 1996.