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The value of a corporate finance department that's scalable is that, adding capacity, adding turnover, adding transactions, even acquiring other businesses, isn't directly commensurate with number of people you need to add to support that. If the processes are well designed and the structure is correct, then the size you need to increase your back office to in order to cope with the increased business, is much smaller. It's not just throwing people at a growing business.

Award winning Finance Journalist, Peter Williams, discusses developments in Turnaround with Peter Charles.

Shared Service Centres (SSCs) are one of the key ways forward for large corporations with geographically widespread and diverse businesses. Shared services are a formal method of internal outsourcing where a function – such as accounting – is re-engineered and standardised. SSCs allow business processes to be brought together in a single location to support multiple business entities on a customer-supplier basis. While it might be relatively straightforward to make the strategic decision to create a SSC, actually creating one is a different matter.

Invariably the path to organisational success is underpinned by a partnership with its people but there's no standard or fixed HR solution to this. HR needs to be commercial and must evolve according to business objectives. Award winning financial journalist, Peter Williams, finds out more from Julia Van der Mark.

Having worked with many businesses in different sectors and with all types of capital structures, we can honestly say that the answer is not obvious. What we can say is that key to a company’s continued success is its ability to recognise and respond to its Transition Point.

Many companies have multiple data warehouses. There may be good reasons for this, for instance legacy systems acquired through mergers or acquisitions, but senior directors should try their best to have only one data warehouse in the company to ensure maximum productivity and minimum confusion. Award winning financial journalist Peter Williams discusses data warehousing with John Urquhart.

Everyone just accepts the presence of a Finance Department in any and every type of organisation but not everyone agrees on exactly what the department should be doing – and that includes the people who work in it. Peter Williams, award winning financial journalist in conversation with Peter Charles.