EU – Baltic States, Forum, Good for Business, Investments, Markets and Companies

In many occasions, the Baltics made good use of the saying “unity is strength” when they started to develop common policies, strategic economic guidelines, transport and communication networks, or energy saving infrastructure to name a few.

Encouraged by a “business friendly environment” made of tax incentives, R&D support or Special Economic Zones development, the economies of the countries have seen a surge in new types of global businesses serving the needs of multinational corporations.

After the 2008 global economic recession, firms such as Western Union, Citco or Barclays have entered the market to set-up their shared service activities in the Baltic countries. Furthermore, the region has been recently awarded internationally for the quality of its infrastructure and its efforts to attract global organizations. Year after year, clusters of shared services centers (SSC) blossomed throughout the Nordic and the wider CEE regions. According to the governmental agency Invest Lithuania, 40 new SSCs have been created just in this country over the last ten years.

These new types of businesses are the reflection of new trends that consist in centralizing transactional activities in lower-cost destinations to save on cost. But over the last 5 years, SSCs have initiated their mutation into providing more and more value-added services to their clients (internal or external). Today, the main challenges they face reside in productivity improvement, centers of excellence development, talent attraction and technology integration.

In a fast changing business environment, adaptability and anticipation are key ingredients to success that number of SSCs want to gear up to.

A team of researchers at Connect Minds have consulted with experts in the region to develop a platform encouraging experience sharing, learning and networking opportunities likely to help organizations tackle the issues they currently have to deal with.

As a result of this research was launched the Baltic Strategic SSC Conference initiative that will take place on 12-14 October in Vilnius, Lithuania. The agenda of the event has been designed around the newly developed “SSCs’ 4 Strategic Pillars” concept addressing topics such as recruitment, attrition, process automation, continuous improvement, technology integration or strategic governance to name a few.

A group of 70 international SSC experts is expected to gather in the Lithuanian capital this October for this first of its kind event in the region supported by Vilnius municipality.

For more information, visit the Baltic Strategic SSC website: http://www.sscbaltic.com/

Invest Lithuania: http://www.investlithuania.com/stories-to-share/ssc-outsourcing/

PWC 2014 study:https://www.pwc.de/de/internationale-maerkte/assets/doing-business-and-investing-in-lithuania-2014.pdf

KPMG study : https://www.kpmg.de/docs/InvestmentBalticSeas.pdf

Istanbul Technical University Study – FDI and Economic growth: The case of Baltic countries: http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/rwe/article/viewFile/5355/3133