Are DACH-based Enterprises Ready to Step Outside their Comfort Zone?

DACH-headquartered companies tend to operate differently. This is most obvious in the more stringent approach to labor regulations, which impacts organizational agility in terms of reacting to global opportunities. As a result, we have traditionally seen less leveraging of global shared services models in organizations headquartered across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as a large proportion of shared services still supporting single functions.

More recently, however, we have seen a number of DACH-based multinationals emulating their global peers and tapping into near- and offshore centers. This trend is being led, to a large extent, by the automotive and manufacturing industry and organizations whose revenue is above US$10 billion.

SSON’s data analytics center (Dart) recently analyzed the global SSC footprint of DACH-based organizations to discover the extent to which near- or offshore locations are being leveraged. Unsurprisingly, a quarter of all these shared services are still located in-country, but Asia along with Eastern Europe account for nearly a third of these shared services centers. in fact, 45% of these organizations are opting to base their shared services centers outside the DACH region.

For those who stay in region, Berlin and Munich are two location hotspots. Overall, however, the west and south of Germany host the largest percentage of SSCs, effectively going where the talent is (in other words, where we see the greatest pool of university graduates).

See all the charts and dive down into the interactive data reports: view the DACH Shared Services Centers Landscape visual report now.