The consensus from NSAM's readers: Wait for the Castros to move on before taking Cuba seriously.
By Jon Tonti
A mere 230 miles from Miami, Havana’s ultra-attractive geographic positioning continues to push Cuba on to the radar of ‘what ifs’ when looking at explosive possibilities in the Nearshore services sector.
But before floating into dream land – let’s review the facts: Cuba’s BPO market today is nearly non-existent and the Cuban government is not focused on jump-starting it. Despite an intelligent workforce that is increasingly exposed to private-run business, Cuba still has a long way to go to become viable for global services. We drew upon our pool of experts and did some poking around of our own to find that Cuba lacks a BPO scene because of the Cuban government’s preference for other industries, a weak technological infrastructure, a dearth of transparency, and political and workforce uncertainty.
Beverly Burke, Director, Information and Promotion at BELTRAIDE, talks about how Belize is making a name for itself in the Nearshore.
Neoris: Driving SAP Leadership
May 3rd, 2012A detailed look at the strategic focus of Neoris (Sponsored video)
Economic Slowdown Won’t Stop IT Expansion in Brazil
May 3rd, 2012
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.
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.
By Dan Berthiaume
When selecting a location for BPO service delivery, there are some standard metrics most BPO buyers use to determine the best location. However, “standard” does not always mean “right.” Just as in so many other areas of business, sometimes the common wisdom in the BPO realm is outdated, distorted or just plain wrong.
By Kevin Church
Latin 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.
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.
PRONicaragua Number One Investment Promotion Agency: World Bank
April 27th, 2012
PRONicaragua stood out with the best results among all investment promotion agencies in the world in the 2012 Global Investment Promotion Benchmarking, recently published by the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).
Among the 189 institutions evaluated, PRONicaragua was the only institution to achieve a rating of “best practice,” the highest distinction awarded by the study in each of the three evaluations implemented. This edition marks the first time in history that a non-member country of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) receives such recognition.
Robert Whyte, the World Bank’s Project Manager for the GIPB 2012, mentioned that with FDI levels only slowly recovering post-crisis, it is more important than ever for government agencies to be highly responsive to the needs of potential investors as they search for new investment locations, adding that …
Neoris CEO on Brazil, Bilingualism and Future Expansion
April 27th, 2012
By Filipe Pacheco
Neoris started as a true Latin American outsourcing company, as a spin-off company of Cemex, one of the biggest businesses from Mexico’s infrastructure industry. Although that beginning occurred very far away from Brazil, a little over a decade after the company started its operation in Brazil, it increasingly focuses its global strategy in the country as one of their biggest opportunities for growth in the world – especially when considering SAP services.
Such attention helps to explain the recent visit of Claudio Muruzabal, global CEO of Neoris, to the SAP Forum recently hosted in São Paulo.
