Monday, May 21st, 2012

glendonTodd Capital LLC, a private equity firm that focuses on investments in business services companies and investments in real estate, announces the acquisition of Toutatis Inc. by glendonTodd Capital LLC and Performa Partners.

Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Toutatis Inc. is a full service business process outsourcing (BPO) provider in Latin America and offers a wide variety of BPO solutions in human resource outsourcing, finance and accounting outsourcing and procurement outsourcing. The firm has offices in ten countries throughout Central and South America, including: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, and Uruguay, giving it the ability to serve international clients with operations throughout the region. The company’s unique ability to deliver BPO services across Latin America from its shared service center in Uberlândia offers flexible and cost-efficient solutions by providing user-friendly, accurate, seamless execution.

Todd Furniss, Managing Partner of glendonTodd Capital explains, “We focus on those industries and companies …

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By: Michael Santamaria

Michael Santamaria 18456 300x198 Be Rigorous from the Start or Your Outsourcing Engagement will Fall Short 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.

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bloomberg latin america investing conference  antonio carlos rego gil 4.26.12 300x200 Economic Slowdown Won’t Stop IT Expansion in Brazil

By Luke Bujarski

Last week’s Bloomberg Latin America Investing conference in New York City was a sobering reminder of Brazil’s precarious economic balancing act hinging on foreign investment, consumption, government stimulus, and inflated commodity prices. Yet, despite mixed signals over the future macro outlook, Brazil’s IT services industry will continue to rage forward. Antonio Gil president of BRASSCOM shrugged off pragmatic panel concerns with confidence, reassuring the audience that IT will expand aggressively at ten percent annually, to reach $210 billion USD by 2020.

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iStock 000010709705XSmall1 300x199 Why Trust, But Verify is Essential in Vendor Management By Michael Blankman

In my recent article, we concluded that the most important aspect of managing remotely is building a strong and trusting relationship. Creating a partnership that doesn’t rely solely on the contract for the outsourcer to get performance security. The partnership is critical because once operations are outsourced, real influence over daily management will and should be limited, or why outsource at all? The partnership needs to be based on respecting each other’s expertise, ensuring roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and that the underlying business model justifying the decision to outsource is protected.

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By Kevin Church 

Church Establishing Nearshore Purchase to Pay Operations: Separating Myth from FactLatin America has received lots of buzz in recent years as a preferred location for shared services operations. An educated and affordable labor pool, business friendly climate, and the necessary infrastructure all make Nearshoring a very attractive option. At the same time, companies establishing new shared services centers have migrated directly to process-centric structures to maximize the benefits of their service-delivery model. One such process model, Purchase-to-Pay (P2P), can provide significant benefits to organizations if an integrated process is established and the appropriate technology is in place to support it. As such, the collaborative workforce and the high rate of technology adoption in Latin America make it an extremely attractive market for P2P solutions.

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By Robert L. Scheier

Contract2 300x196 Managing Outsourcers: When SLAs Dont Do the Job 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.

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Uribe at Podium1 300x200 Uribe Declares New Day for Nearshore at Nexus

Uribe highlighted positive social, political and business developments in the Latin American/Caribbean region

Kirk Laughlin, CEO of Nearshore Americas, kicked off today’s Nearshore Nexus Conference at the Crowne Plaza in New York City by stating nearshore outsourcing has gone from “novel to mainstream.” Laughlin promised that conference speakers would illustrate how outsourcing destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean are “no longer in the shadow of India or China,” but have instead become vibrant providers of sophisticated IT and business outsourcing services in their own right. The first speaker, former President of the Republic of Colombia Mr. Alvaro Uribe, delivered on that promise.

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iStock 000005265706XSmall 2 300x193 When Outsourcing Relationships Go Bad: Warning Signs of a Fraying PartnershipBy 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.

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cape town 300x225 South Africa Bursts on the Global Outsourcing Scene With Lessons for Latin AmericaBy James Bargent

When consultancy firm Everest Group last year asked offshore service providers around the world where they planned to expand their global footprint, South Africa ranked firmly in the top three answers with only China and Brazil offering serious competition. We decided to examine what is so appealing about South Africa – and more importantly – what strategies investment  agencies are executing to win a surprising amount of global attention. 

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By Robert L. Scheier

sunset 300x199 New Survey Claims US Clients Prefer Farshore to Nearshore 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.

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