Capgemini is Bullish on LATAM and Sees Brazil and Guatemala as Key Engines
February 5th, 2010An Interview with David Poole, VP and Head of LATAM BPO Services, Capgemini
By Dennis Barker
When Capgemini decided to venture into Latin America, it was like the beginning of any serious relationship: Exciting, promising, but not without reason for a few jitters.
“Latin America is one of the fastest growing regions in the world, and will continue to be. We’ll see huge growth, particularly in Brazil” – David Poole
“All our clients had been asking about Latin America,” said David Poole, vice president and head of American Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini. “But it had always been an area where we were nervous to tread. It was in the early days a different economic environment, with unpredictable currency and different tax structures. It was a complicated place to do business.”
The biggest concerns revolved not around what might seem like the usual outsourcing challenges — finding capable workers, dealing with cultural differences, meeting clients’ cost objectives — but business issues.
“Our group had found it was not the easiest place to grow a business portfolio,” Poole said. “The big thing was creating enough scale to operate in an efficient way. Most of our clients are some of the largest companies in the world. They are not Latin American entities but multinationals. To meet their needs, it can be difficult unless you have the scale to do that.”
Unilever Turning Point
Capgemini’s agreement in 2008 to acquire and manage Unilever’s financial shared service centers in Sao Paulo and in Santiago, Chile, helped provide that scale. As part of the deal, Capgemini would provide BPO services for Unilever’s businesses in Latin America. “The Unilever acquisition gave us coverage in all the Latin American countries,” Poole said. “We can create scale to provide services even where we don’t have a physical presence.”
While Chile and Argentina are prominent in Capgemini’s LATAM plan, Brazil “has been quite amazing for us,” Poole said. “There are a lot of large Brazilian multinational companies, but Brazil is a huge market in its own right, especially for BPO services. Clients are seeking rigorous process, rigorous control. We’ve seen a great deal of interest from domestic companies, looking for lower-cost locations within Brazil.” Regional differences in operational and employment costs can range from 15 to 20 percent, he said.
There is More to Offshoring that Just Achieving Cost Wins
October 2nd, 2009By Josh Hyatt, CFO Magazine
Even before Ajit Singh made a formal announcement about his company’s offshoring plans, employees knew what he would say. “The more I talked,” recalls the CEO of Bioimagene, a maker of computer-aided diagnostic tools, “the more I think they could see my rationale.”
True, some voiced concern about the restructuring scheme, most of which would play out 8,000 miles and nine time zones away from the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. There, in the city of Pune, India, the company employed dozens of software developers — about twice as many employees as in the United States — and they cost about 75% less than their American counterparts.
Those Indian employees had been with the company from its 2004 start, as a way to help Bioimagene stretch its initial funding as far as possible. Singh, a 20-year Siemens veteran who joined Bioimagene last fall, took immediate …
