By Filipe Pacheco
Genpact is definitely a global leader when it comes to business process and technology management. But, in Brazil, the company`s strategy is to learn with the Brazilians how to be successful in the local market and the intentions are to start to follow a growing path from now on. “We are a global company with local presence. In Brazil, we knew it was necessary to come up with a Brazilian team that understands the local market very well,” said Affonso Nina, Genpact`s new Brazil`s country manager. “And, with that process, we had to have in mind the word adaptation”.
By: Michael Santamaria
There’s little doubt that Business Process Outsourcing is here to stay; the lure of “easy” cost savings is just too powerful for companies to resist. But the truth of the matter is that implementing a successful outsourcing project is hard work and realizing those “easy” savings is by no means a foregone conclusion. While data on outsourcing failure is hard to come by, the Aberdeen Group has reported that 21% of outsourcing projects fail to meet stakeholder expectations, and Gartner puts the outsourcing failure rate as high as 30%. Although neither study defines what constitutes a “failure,” the bottom line is a large percent of projects end with unhappy clients.
Managing Outsourcers: When SLAs Don’t Do the Job
May 1st, 2012By Robert L. Scheier
Service level agreements (SLAs) are the heart and soul of many outsourcing contracts. They define what the provider must deliver and their penalties for failure, in anything from application uptime to the time required to solve a customer’s problem on a help line.
But at least as currently defined, SLAs often fall short of detecting (and, more importantly, correcting) problems quickly. That was the message at the recent SIG Spring Summit from Senior Corporate Counsel Richard English of Ingram Micro and Shaalu Mehra of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, who helps the electronic distributor negotiate outsourcing deals.
By Kenneth Hess
No one wants for a relationship to fail but sometimes you have to quit on one that isn’t working. How do you know when to say, “When?”
Relationships are difficult. Band members have creative differences, teammates have ego problems and marriage partners have irreconcilable differences. Likewise, vendors and clients in business-to-business relationships experience all of the pains of band members, teammates and marriage partners. Maintaining a positive relationship is challenging when everything goes well but adding in technological differences, language barriers and time zone disparities has the effect of widening the gap between client and vendor.
New Survey Claims US Clients Prefer Farshore to Nearshore
April 10th, 2012By Robert L. Scheier
A recent study out of Duke University shows that American companies still prefer India, China and the Philippines to the Latin American Nearshore for IT infrastructure and application development and maintenance (ADM). The percentage of finance and accounting work done in Latin America rose from 10 percent in 2009 to 16 percent in 2011, with application development and maintenance (ADM) work rising from seven to 12 percent in the same period, according to the International Offshoring Research Network Project at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
Shake, Rattle and Roll: Make Remote Management an Active Process
April 10th, 2012By Steve Rudderham
Most outsourcing arrangements are literally “out” sourced in that services are delivered from a remote location. Whether that location is within a few miles of your corporate headquarters or on the other side of the globe, you need to ensure the services are delivered in the appropriate manner without physically being there to oversee the operation. The provider often promises an “extension of your operations,” but this task often winds up being one of the biggest challenges of BPO, but fortunately there are a few basic steps BPO buyers can take to manageably ensure quality service delivery from remote locations.
By Heather Littlejohns
Companies seeking to locate new outsourced or shared services centers to offshore or near shore locations typically focus their exploration on factors such as price, local government support and incentives, cultural affinity with the target market, unemployment rates, labor pool, language skills, etc. But are companies really taking the necessary time to explore, assess and discuss their own points of differentiation as they are perceived by the local population?
US and Europe to Lose Millions of Business Services Jobs as Part of “Natural Evolution” of Globalization
April 4th, 2012By Jon Tonti
Of the 8.2 million business services jobs held domestically at the beginning of 2002 in some 4,700 companies based in North America and Europe only 4.5 million will remain in their domestic markets by 2016 according to a study by The Hackett Group, a management consulting firm. The same study finds that the amount of business services work moving offshore will “level off significantly” during the next few years due to changes in the conditions of offshore drivers.
Customers Make Clear that Outsourcing is About Adding Value
April 4th, 2012
By Robert L. Scheier
As the global economy improves, customers are looking to outsourcers to not only save money, but to drive growth, improve quality and drive innovation.
Those were among the key themes from two days prowling the corridors and break-outs at the Sourcing Interest Group (SIG) spring summit. Speaker after speaker, whether the topic was procurement, category management or macroeconomic trends, described how their employers are trying to use outsourcers not “just” to save money but to make a more strategic contribution.
By Luke Bujarski
The next-generation of outsourcers could soon be relocating to a place most of us only hear about after the news of some high-profile tax scandal hits the morning papers. With only 55,000 inhabitants, it doesn’t take long to realize that the Cayman Islands will never be Latin America’s BPO workhorse. Yet, this has not stopped real estate group Cayman City Enterprise from working with the local authority to build out a 50-acre business park catering to, among other niche industries, outsourced services firms.
