A Case Study on Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase of Financial
Shared Service Centre: A Case Study of Changhong, Sichuan
Province
Tianyue Bai
Auditing, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, 200126, China
Keywords: Financial Sharing Service Centre, Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase, Path, Sichuan Changhong.
Abstract: In this paper, Sichuan Changhong is selected as a case study, from the organizational structure, information
system, business process, respectively, to explore the function of the financial sharing service centre to help
enterprises to achieve cost reduction and efficiency, and from the management cost, financial operation
efficiency, and business processing efficiency to see the specific results of the financial sharing service
centre. Through the research on the annual report data of Changhong, the paper finds that the financial
sharing service centre has a positive effect on the cost-saving and efficiency-increasing of Sichuan
Changhong, as the management cost can be reduced after stable implementation of the financial sharing
platform and the average assets managed by each financial personnel of the enterprise are gradually
increased. Taking Sichuan Changhong as an example, this paper studies how to reduce the cost and increase
the efficiency of the enterprises by the construction of the financial sharing service centre.
1 INTRODUCTION
Data has become an important new production
factor, digital technology, intelligent means have
begun to reshape the financial process and mode of
enterprises. Digital intellectualization is the
intelligentization on the basis of digitalization,
aiming to realize the overall, systematic and
intelligentized decision-making with the aid of
digital technology. The data intelligence
environment provides a new opportunity and
connotation for the construction and operation of the
financial sharing service centre (Xu, 2024). The
number intelligent financial sharing service centre
refers to the financial sharing service centre that
widely uses the number intelligent technologies such
as RPA, OCR, NLP, AI and GPT in the construction
of the financial sharing service centre to improve the
efficiency of financial sharing and promote the
financial digital transformation. The business data,
financial data, industry data, supply chain data,
contract data, tax data and other data that help
enterprises to make decisions are centralized, the
financial decision-making model is established, and
the enterprise decision-making is supported, which
solves the problems of incomplete information of
financial personnel, out of control of fund security
and passivation of management effect under the
decentralized financial management mode. With the
development of "Digital China" strategy, the
enterprise digital transformation has put forward
new challenges to the concept and mode of financial
management. The financial sharing service centre
provides a natural platform for the transformation of
enterprise financial management. The financial
sharing service has become the booster of the
enterprise financial digital transformation (Tang,
2019). Taking Sichuan Changhong as an example,
this paper studies how to reduce the cost and
increase the efficiency of the enterprises by the
construction of the financial sharing service centre.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Janssen and Joha (2004), Soalheira (2007), Trollius
and Wang (2016) believe that the implementation of
the financial sharing service mode can simplify the
financial work while saving the resources of the
enterprise, speed up the flow of funds, thereby
reducing the cost of the enterprise, speed up the
financial efficiency, and improve the profit
Bai, T.
A Case Study on Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase of Financial Shared Service Centre: A Case Study of Changhong, Sichuan Province.
DOI: 10.5220/0013842400004719
Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on E-commerce and Modern Logistics (ICEML 2025), pages 255-263
ISBN: 978-989-758-775-7
Proceedings Copyright © 2025 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
255

proportion of the core business. Hirschfleld (1996),
Jassen et al. (2011), Casey and Totenhagen (2019)
also pointed out that the enterprise financial sharing
platform can rationally distribute the funds, assist
the enterprise to effectively expand the scope of
operation and smoothly carry out the merger
activities, so as to improve the status of competitors
in the same industry. Zhang (2018) holds that the
financial sharing service centre can transfer data and
process business with the help of information
systems such as ERPs, thus realizing the optimal
allocation of internal and external resources of the
enterprise to a certain extent, and greatly reducing
the cost of the enterprise. Yao et al. (2019) believed
that the reasonable use of the financial cloud sharing
service platform, give full play to the guidance effect
of cloud sharing on financial process reengineering,
help to integrate financial information resources and
improve the enterprise performance level. Jiang et
al. (2023) pointed out that the implementation of
intelligent finance can improve the financial
performance of enterprises by reducing the operating
cost and improving the R&D capability. Li et al.
(2025) pointed out that the key influencing factors in
the process of intelligent transformation of financial
sharing are technical characteristics, internal and
external environment, process organization and
management.
3 CASE INTRODUCTION
3.1 Overview of Sichuan Changhong
Group
Sichuan Changhong was founded in 1958, and its
predecessor was one of the key projects of 156 in
China. With the continuous development of
technology and TV, Sichuan Changhong began to
carry out diversified expansion of information
electronics, from manufacturing military products to
developing and selling military industry, household
appliances, industrial services, spare parts and other
businesses. After more than 60 years of
development, the brand value of Sichuan Changhong
has reached 203.968 billion yuan, with industrial
activities in more than 130 countries and regions,
many production bases at home and abroad, and
more than 200 branches at home. The main
businesses of Sichuan Changhong include consumer
appliances represented by intelligent household
appliances, and IT integrated services represented by
mass distribution of digital products and cloud
computing value-added services. Among them, the
sales scale of TV and refrigerator is in the leading
position in the industry, the refrigerator compressor
is the first in the world, the inverter compressor is
the first in the world, the commercial compressor is
the first in the country, and the ICT comprehensive
service and special power supply and other
businesses always maintain the leading position in
the industry. At present, the headquarters of Sichuan
Changhong Finance Sharing Service Centre is
located in Mianyang, Sichuan, with more than 470
employees in Beijing, Shanghai and other central
cities. Through years of experience, Sichuan
Changhong has accumulated rich experience in
process management and financial sharing, laying a
foundation for rapid transformation and rapid
development of enterprises.
3.2 Construction Process of Financial
Sharing Service Centre of Sichuan
Changhong Group
As shown by Table 1, the construction of the
financial sharing service centre of Sichuan
Changhong Group has gone through several stages.
In 2005, Sichuan Changhong put forward the reform
of business model and the idea of building the
financial sharing service centre, providing two
functions of management and service for the
enterprise. In December 2008, Sichuan Changhong
formally set up a financial sharing service centre to
separate from other organizations within the
enterprise group, further strengthen the application
of the sharing service concept, and start to provide
relevant consulting services for the group and collect
service fees. Since 2009, Sichuan Changhong has
deepened the financial reform, and the financial
sharing service centre has entered the development
period. In the stage, enterprises have built two
platforms and three systems of financial information
system. In 2011, the enterprise financial sharing
service centre optimized the information system,
established the customer relationship of
marketization mode, and realized independent
operation. In 2013, Sichuan Changhong changed its
original strategy and began to adopt the new three-
coordinate strategy of "intelligence, network and
coordination." The project construction of financial
cloud has been started. With the help of big data,
cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other
technologies, the business process has been re-
engineered, so that the Group has broken the
regional restrictions when processing data and
making decisions, achieved the purpose of reducing
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cost and increasing efficiency, promoted the
financial transformation of enterprises and formed a
new management mode. In recent years, Changhong
Finance Sharing Service Centre has been deeply
cultivated in "Digital Finance," and has participated
in many pilot projects such as state-tax enterprises
and electronic vouchers of the Ministry of Finance.
Table 1: Development history of Sichuan Changhong Financial Shared Service Centre.
Year 2005 2006 to 2008 2009 to 2012 2013 to present
Period Germination period Initial period Development period Mature period
Content Put forward the
concept of financial
reform;
Establish financial
management centre
and financial service
centre.
Establish a financial
sharing service centre
(independent of the
enterprise).
Deepen the reform of
the financial sharing
service centre;
Realize market-
oriented independent
operation.
Adopt the new three-
coordinate strategy;
Start the financial
cloud construction.
3.3 Organization Model of Finance
Shared Service Centre of Sichuan
Changhong Group
After the establishment of the financial sharing
service centre in Changhong, the financial
organization structure tends to be flat. According to
the announcement of Changhong, after the
construction of the financial sharing service centre,
the number of accounting personnel of the large-
scale molecular institutions in the enterprise has
been reduced by nearly 50%, and the small-scale
molecular institutions can complete daily financial
work only by relying on the staff responsible for
cashier and document processing. With the
amalgamation of repeated similar businesses,
Sichuan Changhong has set up a special finance
department and accounting team, strengthened the
specialized division of labour, and simplified and
standardized the complex financial work. The
financial sharing service centre in Changhong,
Sichuan Province has formed the three function
distribution systems of shared finance, business
finance and strategic finance (Liu, 2023)
In the operation of financial sharing service
mode, Sichuan Changhong has created the
organization structure of the centre, as shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1: Organization Chart of Sichuan Changhong Financial Shared Service Centre.
A Case Study on Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase of Financial Shared Service Centre: A Case Study of Changhong, Sichuan Province
257

4 HOW TO REDUCE COST AND
INCREASE EFFICIENCY BY
ESTABLISHING FINANCIAL
SHARED SERVICE CENTER IN
CHANGHONG
4.1 Impact Path
After the establishment of the financial sharing
service centre in Changhong, Sichuan Province, the
similar and easy-to-standardize businesses are
processed centrally, reducing the redundant financial
organization structure, reducing the labour cost and
improving the financial processing efficiency, which
can reduce the cost and increase the efficiency to a
certain extent. Through analysing the concrete ways
of reducing cost and increasing efficiency of
Sichuan Changhong Financial Sharing Centre, it is
found that the influence ways are mainly reflected in
optimizing financial organization structure,
perfecting financial information system and
simplifying business processing process. Figure 2
shows the impact path of enterprise cost reduction
and efficiency improvement by the construction of
Sichuan Changhong Financial Shared Service
Centre.
Figure 2: Impact Path of Enterprise Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase by Construction of Finance
4.1.1 Optimize Financial Organization
Structure
After the financial sharing service centre was built in
Changhong, Sichuan Province, the previous
accounting, statement registration and other
repetitive work processing processes were
consolidated and concentrated in an independent
organization. The accountants of each molecular
organization were separated from the basic business,
and the focus of work was shifted to the financial
budget, credit management and other aspects, so the
organizational structure of the enterprise was also
changed. In addition, before the construction, the
financial director of Sichuan Changhong is mainly
responsible for the overall arrangement of the
financial work of the enterprise, which is limited to
the financial aspect, and has no energy to invest in
the making of the major decisions of the enterprise.
After the establishment, the financial director is
responsible for the related work of the finance, and
can also change the role to the strategic level of the
enterprise, and clearly understand the overall
operation of the enterprise by participating in the
making of decisions, driving the performance of the
department and other aspects Sichuan Changhong
adopts the organization mode of financial sharing
service centre and financial department at the same
level (Liu, 2023). The management flexibility is
higher and the autonomy is stronger. It also indicates
that the enterprise attaches great importance to the
financial sharing service centre, and the financial
sharing centre has a high voice in the daily operation
of the group, so that the enterprise can smoothly
carry out work and strengthen the exchange and
cooperation with other departments.
After the establishment of the financial sharing
service centre in Changhong, the financial
organization structure tends to be flat, which is
beneficial to the improvement of enterprise
performance. On the one hand, the change of
organizational structure simplifies the allocation of
financial personnel, on the other hand, with the
merging of repeated business of the same kind,
Sichuan Changhong has set up a special financial
department and a verification team, strengthening
the specialized division of labour, simplifying and
standardizing the complex financial work. Figure 3
is a path analysis diagram of the financial shared
service centre in terms of organizational structure to
make the enterprise cost-effective.
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Figure 3: Path Analysis of Financial Shared Service Centre for Enterprise Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement in
Organizational Structure.
4.1.2 Improve Financial Information System
With the help of Hongxin software, Figure 4 shows
that Sichuan Changhong has set up ERP and WEB
platforms, financial core management system,
financial cooperation processing system and
business cooperation processing system.
After the establishment of the financial sharing
service centre in Changhong, Sichuan Province, the
ERP and SEI platforms were built through the
establishment of the information system to complete
the data processing related to the business activities
online, reducing the error rate of information and
strengthening the timeliness of transmission. Ye
Honglin, relevant responsible person of Sichuan
Changhong, mentioned in the interview that the
Financial Sharing Service Centre built the BI
information system, automatically extracted the
business data information of each molecular
organization, and the preparation time of the data
required for the quarterly operation analysis
meeting of enterprises was at least 10 days earlier.
At the same time, with the continuous optimization
of business process and the continuous update of
information system, the degree of accounting
automation in Sichuan Changhong increased from
40% to 90%, and the accounting error rate
decreased from 5% to 0.5%. With the help of
financial sharing centre, the depth and efficiency of
financial control have been improved. Due to the
support of business process standardization reform
and quality management process system, the degree
of enterprise financial integration is greatly
improved, which greatly improves the accuracy,
authenticity and timeliness of enterprise financial
accounting, and improves the efficiency of
accounting work by about 35%. Secondly, Sichuan
Changhong completed the automation and
informationization of enterprise accounting work
with the aid of information system, pulled out the
basic core business, released the accounting
personnel, improved the original tedious processing
process, and further improved the allocation of
human resources. At the same time, based on the
application of Sichuan Changhong information
platform, organizations with authority can complete
the reimbursement of expenses and the collection
and payment of funds online, realize the sharing of
financial data worldwide, save the labour consumed
by information transmission, and reduce the overall
operation cost of enterprises.
4.1.3 Simplify Business Processes
All links of the traditional financial management
model need manual participation, the quality of work
is easily affected by the quality of personnel, cost
efficiency and other factors, work efficiency cannot
be further improved. After the establishment of the
financial sharing service centre in Changhong,
Sichuan Province, the financial workflow is handled
by the system, which completely replaces the labour
by means of cloud collection, cloud processing, etc.
The establishment of the financial sharing service
centre has established a standardized standard
process, which makes the whole process dependable.
The accounting business is automated through the
standardization of accounting and electronic
vouchers, which improves the work efficiency,
shortens the work time and ensures the accuracy of
data accounting.
Financial
sharing
service
Flat financial
organization
structure
Simplify financial
staffing
Cost reduction
and efficiency
increase
Repeat homogeneous
financial business and
merge professional
financial department and
accounting department
Financial
business
standardization
A Case Study on Cost Reduction and Efficiency Increase of Financial Shared Service Centre: A Case Study of Changhong, Sichuan Province
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Figure 4: Sichuan Changhong Financial Information Management System
With the help of ERP platform, CRM system,
SRM system and expense management system, the
financial sharing service centre realizes business
process reengineering, simplifies the basic processes
of enterprise purchase payment, sales collection and
expense reimbursement, and is uniformly deployed
by the financial sharing service centre. According to
the announcement of Sichuan Changhong official
website, the current business automation degree of
Sichuan Changhong reaches 96%, the time limit of
financial accounting only takes 0.5 working days,
the time limit of expense reimbursement is from the
original week to the present 20 minutes, the
operation rate of enterprise funds is greatly
improved, and the fund management efficiency is
further improved.
4.2 Effect
4.2.1 Management Cost
It can be seen from Table 2 that the total assets of
Sichuan Changhong after the establishment of the
financial sharing service centre are in a rising trend,
which can reflect the gradual expansion of the
enterprise scale. Since a large amount of personnel is
required in the initial stage of construction, the
management cost of the enterprise has increased.
After 2013, the financial sharing service centre
entered a mature period, and after stable operation,
the management cost began to decrease year by year.
Meanwhile, the ratio of the management cost to the
asset also showed a downward trend year by year.
This shows that the effect of the financial sharing
service centre in the management cost has a cushion
process, and the management cost can be reduced
after stable implementation of the financial sharing
platform. Based on the changes in the management
expenses of Sichuan Changhong Financial Shared
Service Centre, it can be found that there is a buffer
process in the cost changes after the formal
construction of the financial shared service centre.
It can be seen that during the construction of the
financial sharing service centre in Changhong, the
change trend of the proportion of management
expenses has been gradually reduced from the initial
rise. The reason for this phenomenon is that Sichuan
Changhong has set up a financial sharing service
centre, which can gather the original decentralized
business units and form a unified business
processing mode. When enterprises increase
industries, they no longer need to establish new
accounting departments, which improves the
management level of enterprises, improves the
economies of scale of enterprises, and thus achieves
the purpose of saving costs.
4.2.2 Financial Operational Efficiency
It can be seen from Table 3 that, with the continuous
expansion of the scale of Sichuan Changhong, the
ratio of total assets to financial personnel of the
enterprise presents a stable growth trend, rising from
0.39 in 2010 to 1.22 in 2023, increasing by nearly
four times, thus indicating that after the
establishment of the financial sharing service centre
in Sichuan Changhong, the increase of financial
personnel is less than the increase of total assets, and
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the average assets managed by each financial
personnel of the enterprise are gradually increased.
It can be shown that after the establishment of the
financial sharing service centre in Changhong, the
financial work efficiency has indeed increased.
Table2: 2010-2023-Year Management Expenses and Assets of Sichuan Changhong
Time
Administrative express
(RMB 100 million)
Total assets
(RMB 100 million)
Overhead/Total Assets
2010 16.17 445.5 3.63%
2011 20.66 516.5 4.00%
2012 22.63 545.5 4.15%
2013 27.12 588.4 4.61%
2014 30.11 602.2 5.00%
2015 28.46 556.2 5.12%
2016 27.3 598.6 4.56%
2017 15.99 628.4 2.54%
2018 15.56 715.1 2.18%
2019 16.9 739.9 2.28%
2020 14.98 785.9 1.91%
2021 17.66 794 2.22%
2022 17.43 855.4 2.04%
2023 18.15 944 1.92%
Table 3: Ratio Between Total Assets and Financial Personnel of Changhong, Sichuan in 2010-2023 Years.
Time Financial personnel
Total assets
(RMB 100 million)
Total assets/
Financial personnel
2010 1154 445.5 0.39
2011 1223 516.5 0.42
2012 1273 545.5 0.43
2013 1194 588.4 0.49
2014 1180 602.2 0.51
2015 831 556.2 0.67
2016 831 598.6 0.72
2017 818 628.4 0.77
2018 991 715.1 0.72
2019 842 739.9 0.88
2020 906 785.9 0.87
2021 816 794 0.97
2022 728 855.4 1.18
2023 776 944 1.22
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Table 4: Business Processing Efficiency of Sichuan Changhong Financial Shared Service Centre
Matters Changes
Length of expense reimbursement Reduced from 7 days to 20 minutes
Meeting preparation time More than 10 days in advance
Degree of automation Above 96%
Per capita orders processed per month Increased by 109.44% from 2160 to 4524
Error rate Reduced from 5 per 10,000 to 0.45 per 10,000
4.2.3
Business Processing Efficiency
As shown in the data in Table 4, after the financial
sharing service centre was constructed in
Changhong, the cost reimbursement time was
shortened from more than seven days to 20 min, and
the error rate was reduced from 0.05% to 0.0045%.
The number of business orders processed per capita
increased by 109.44% from 2160 to 4524 per month.
At the same time, the automation information
system makes the quarterly business analysis
meeting preparation time at least 10 days in advance,
and the automation degree is more than 96%. The
financial sharing service centre of enterprises
increases the speed of information transmission,
optimizes the financial work of enterprises, and
enhances the effectiveness of enterprise decision-
making.
5 CONCLUSION
Taking Sichuan Changhong as an example, this
paper deeply studies how to reduce the cost and
increase the efficiency of the enterprises by the
construction of the financial sharing service centre
of the number of intellectualized enterprises. By
analysing the construction process, organization
mode and infrastructure of the financial sharing
service centre of Sichuan Changhong Group, as well
as the concrete measures in optimizing the financial
organization structure, perfecting the financial
information system and simplifying the business
processing process, we find that the construction of
the financial sharing service centre of Sichuan
Changhong has a significant impact on the cost-
saving and efficiency improvement of Sichuan
Changhong. Sichuan Changhong has successfully
reduced the labour cost, improved the financial
processing efficiency, optimized the financial
organization structure, and perfected the information
system and business processing flow, thus realizing
the decrease of the proportion of management
expenses, and the great improvement of the financial
operation efficiency and business processing
efficiency.
The constant development of big data era
provides necessary conditions for financial
transformation. In the future, it is still necessary to
continue to deeply study the operation mechanism
and function upgrade of big data, artificial
intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain,
clarify the combination point and application section
with the financial field, construct the technology
application platform according to the characteristics
of finance, promote the future of financial
digitalization and intelligent transformation, and the
number of intelligent financial sharing service centre
will develop in the direction of technology
innovation and strategy combination (ZhuXiangyu,
2025).
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