The 2024 Award Winners Compilation showcases the achievements of last year’s top SSON Impact Award winners, highlighting how each team tackled complex challenges and delivered standout results. Dive into these success stories to gain insights into innovative strategies and discover inspiration for your own organization’s path to excellence.

The brochure provides essential details, including eligibility criteria, submission guidelines, and important dates for SSON's 2025 Impact Awards ceremony, making it a must-read for all North American Shared Services practitioners seeking recognition and celebration of their successes.

About This Award: Automation has changed the nature of SSO/GBS work over the past decade plus. The impact of automation on service delivery can take many forms – workflow technology, self-service systems, Robotic Process Automation, and now also Artificial Intelligence. The options are endless and ever-expanding. This Automation Impact award is focused on the strategic automation methodology being implemented, its benefits, and the hard, quantifiable impact that the automation has brought to shared services.

Please return the completed application to will.thomae@ssonetwork.com 

About This Award: Traditional Business Continuity Plans have come under the spotlight since the pandemic caused major upheavals. Shared Services operating at the forefront of business support have had to reconsider their resilience strategies and double down on them to reassure the enterprise. This award category is focused on the crisis management, risk management, and business continuity strategies that are securing long-term stability in shared services and global business services, with a focus on long-term impact.

About This Award: Creative Talent Management can take many forms: long term leadership capability, building a strong talent pool, creating a culture in which managers are accountable for their talent, defining the right profile of people and skills, etc. Managing talent effectively is a major challenge. This award category is focused on the strategy, skill sets, improvement methodology, the rise of digital talent, benefits, and hard improvements that Shared Services have achieved in talent management.

About This Award: Customer Centricity in Shared Services can take many forms: understanding and meeting customers’ expectations, effective management of customer needs, designing the experience, complaints resolutions, developing metrics that matter, and encouraging feedback that drives continuous improvement. As customer expectations and behaviors have caused seismic shifts across business models, organizations have enhanced their focus on customer experience through front, middle and back office processes. This Award will focus on how business services are driving a consistent and seamless experience across all of customer touchpoints. This award category is focused on the strategy, methodology, benefits, and hard improvements Shared Services have made to improve the focus on their customers.

About This Award: Change Management & Business Transformation can take many forms: a different means of managing service delivery, increasing specialized knowledge, offering “expertise” services, accelerating digital transformation, embracing the workforce of the future, etc. Shared Services are the engines driving transformation, so how are they reflecting today’s enterprise priorities? Alongside any transformation, the ability to manage change as part of your day-to-day operations is crucial to ensure the cultural transformation required for execution and growth. This award is focused on the strategy, improvement methodology, benefits and impacts achieved by Shared Services along with their ability to navigate hyper-change.

About this Award: Finance Transformation can be measured in various ways. Cost cutting, of course, but also value-generation, faster cycle times, data standardization, or leveraging cognitive technology to improve decision-making – to name just a few. This application focuses on the results or outputs of a specific Finance Transformation, highlighting its impact in measurable terms compared to the initial baseline.

About This Award: HR Impact can take many forms: improving employee experience, becoming an employer of choice, elevating self-service capabilities, increasing personalization and customization, better business partnering, leveraging analytics to support HR processes, reducing cost, and fostering innovation through digitalization and new generation technologies. This award category is focused on HR transformation resulting in measurable “impact” such as cost, capability, workforce, talent, etc.

About This Award: Process improvement can take many forms: Eliminating waste in operations, eliminating friction points for customers, process redesign as part of continuous improvement, innovations in process outcomes or even training related processes. Value creation means delivering shareholder value in terms of either top-line growth, bottom-line improvements or even experience related value-add. This award category is focused on the strategy, improvement methodology and benefits/hard improvements in process improvement and value creation that have been made by a shared services organization.

About This Award: Service providers form an invaluable part of the service delivery ecosystem. For those SSO/GBS that elect to use a third party BPO (business process outsourcer), the resources they can tap, along with the expertise and technology thus offered, are core reasons for outsourcing. There are hundreds of service providers that Shared Services Organizations can utilize to help improve their processes, apply their technologies and achieve a higher level of service for internal customers. This award category is focused on singling out a service provider that has improved an SSO’s impact and efficiencies beyond the original scope – and which has, therefore, become an invaluable partner – not only to the SSO, but the business, as well.

About This Award: There are hundreds, if not thousands, of technologies that Shared Services can utilize to improve their performance and outputs. This award category is focused on singling out one technology solution that has significantly impacted a Shared Services’ performance to the extent that it has become invaluable. This application could relate to a new implementation, or expanded use of an existing technology.