Almadar A group processing payables separately in offices near Al Olaya and An Nakheel is paying twice for the same work that a single shared service team in KAFD could handle once.
This sits within the broader finance operating model decision about how work should be organized across your group, and it's typically the single biggest structural lever available once a finance function assessment has identified genuine duplication across entities.
What actually moves into a shared service center
High-volume, standardized transactional work, invoice processing, payment runs, basic account reconciliations, is the natural first candidate. Judgment-heavy work, financial analysis, tax strategy, entity-specific relationship management, stays with local or specialist teams close to the business it serves.
Why this matters more for multi-city Riyadh groups specifically
A group with finance staff duplicated across a Riyadh head office, a branch and a facility often has three people each doing largely the same accounts payable process with three different levels of consistency and three different sets of informal workarounds, when one properly resourced and standardized team could do it better, more consistently, and at lower total cost.
Where this connects to specific process design
This connects directly to procure-to-pay and order-to-cash optimization, since these tend to be the highest-volume, most standardizable transactional flows in most companies and are almost always the first processes centralized when a shared service model is introduced.
What we deliver
An honest assessment of which processes are genuine candidates for centralization versus which genuinely need to stay local, a transition plan that doesn't disrupt operations during the actual move, and the service level agreements that keep the centralized team properly accountable to the entities it now serves.
Making the transition stick
The biggest risk to a shared service center isn't the initial design, it's entities quietly reverting to local workarounds six months later once attention moves elsewhere. Clear service level agreements with genuine consequences, not just aspirational targets, are what keep the new structure actually functioning once the project team has moved on.
Riyadh industrial companies with high-volume, complex vendor and procurement relationships often see the largest efficiency gain from centralizing accounts payable specifically, given the sheer transaction volume typically involved in running an industrial operation compared to a smaller Riyadh trading office.