The growing number of shared service centres (SSCs) in China and the greater Asia-Pacific region face a battle to attract and retain talent, while remaining competitive in a tough global market.

According to a new report by released by Deloitte and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) on August 26, the SSCs, to control labour costs, differentiate themselves as employers of choice by building a strong brand both within and outside the organization, as well as creating a pleasurable place to work to attract the highest quality talent.

In China, the yearly average wages has been increasing by between 9% and 14% annually for the past few years. And as the cost of wages and benefits increased the cost of shared services, the companies are turning to other more strategic measures to attract and retain talent, including aligning the human resources and facility strategies within the local culture.

For example, some companies in China have taken steps to provide employees with more modern and state-of-the-art work environments, including gym and other lifestyle facilities, differentiating themselves with other typical SSCs.

"In an ever increasingly competitive market, SSCs have to essentially battle it out with each other to prove why people should choose to work for them specifically," says Ada Leung, head of ACCA China. "To entice people looking for work in China, some SSCs offer benefits such as gym membership to help create a work-life balance, which is ultimately what everyone wants."

But while the focus on talent management will remain a key priority for many SSCs, achieving success will not be easy, the report says. In the Deloitte 2014 survey, the respondents indicated their SSCs faced an actual average turnover of 8.3%, which is higher than their expected average target rate of 7.2%. "We believe this trend will continue, but with time, this could be an opportunity for SSCs to differentiate themselves as an employer of choice," the report adds.

The report, based on in-depth interviews with senior finance and SSC leaders, also found that rising staff and operational costs drive companies to use technology, such as artificial intelligent automation, to handle rule-based or high volume transactional process, trigger responses and interface with existing applications for processing routine tasks.

It says such automation allows processing to be executed continuously with minimal human intervention with the additional benefits of reducing turnaround time, higher quality, lower error rates and a reduction in management oversight.

It adds that one of the survey respondents estimates that the total cost of processing was reduced by 50% through automation when compared with human processing. "As the technology matures and stabilizes, these savings could be even greater," the report points out.

The main opportunity for process automation are the transactional processes, specifically accounts payable, accounts receivable and certain standard accounting and control processes such as bank reconciliations.

Another key theme for SSCs is an increasing focus for taking a global approach to process delivery and standardization. As the SSCs mature and as pressure grows on finance functions to reduce their operation cost further, the report notes there is an increasing focus on taking a global approach to process delivery and standardization.

The benefit of this focus on process standardization and specialization is to breakdown the need for hard geographic team structures within the SSC, allowing for more flexible work and resource allocations. The result is measurable improvements in per capital efficiency underpinned by improvements in process output quality.

The report also highlights that as SSCs gradually evolve from a predominantly transactional-based environment into a multi-functioned SSCs, with higher value processes, the governance structure will need to be tailored to ensure the same level of quality control.

It notes that most organizations now have adopted and implemented service level agreements (SLAs) to govern service delivery through captive SSCs. However, as performance expectations, process complexity and sophistication of process delivery have all increased, the governance models adopted are also adapting in complexity and maturity.