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Excerpt of paper published in 2007 by Accenture.

By Robert Easton, Global Bundled Outsourcing Lead, Accenture

At a high level, bundled outsourcing is a strategy for building scale, creating synergies and shedding costs by outsourcing several business functions to a single services provider. It isn't about offloading poorly managed processes or simply consolidating vendors and sub-processes.

Less clear, however, may be all the ways that outsourcing to a single services provider unlocks business value.

After all, when business functions are outsourced to multiple providers, scale opportunities are sacrificed and extra "failure points" (complete with blurred lines of accountability and governance) are added.

So what about the finance & accounting function? Are the opportunities to bundle F&A with other business processes just as great? Absolutely! According to Everest Group, finance is often the "hub" of a bundled outsourcing arrangement.

Outsourcing Finance & Accounting and Human Resources

Outsourcing Finance & Accounting and Human Resources consolidates HR administration with back office processes, such as payroll and expense reporting. In addition to raising personnel performance, it frequently improves cash flow and compliance with payroll expense policies. The reason is that HR and F&A, too, have extensive technology and administrative overlaps: organizational data/hierarchy and approval structures, such as travel & expense or purchases, often involve HR and F&A. HR payroll issues that involve the finance organization can be addressed as a single, end to end process.

Outsourcing Finance & Accounting and Information Technology

Outsourcing Finance & Accounting and IT can release myriad synergies: bundling the two functions generally implies an IT infrastructure based on optimal finance processes, as opposed to cumbersome "workarounds" and processes whose designs are driven by whatever technology was chosen. Streamlined governance (functional management under one umbrella) is another advantage, with lower costs often resulting from improved business performance, less complexity and reduced duplication of effort. Workflow solutions, accounts payable approvals and management reporting can all be more effectively executed if F&A and IT are addressed as a holistic outsourcing solution.

The Whole Exceeds the Sum of the Parts

Few companies dispute the value of outsourcing. In fact, there are very few organizations that receive no outside assistance or that outsource only a single function. Not many, however, develop third party relationships with the expectation that multi-process outsourcing synergies will result. But that's what can happen: bundling outsourced F&A with other processes can mean new opportunities to streamline back-office operations, simplify governance, reduce costs, improve compliance, optimize process performance, leverage scale, raise accountability, limit capital outlays, minimize risk and ensure continuous improvement.

© 2007 Accenture. All rights reserved.