Visa Delays: Maintaining Knowledge Transfer Amid Timing Turmoil
October 21st, 2011SPECIAL GUEST POST: Kathy Welch, Senior Advisor, TPI
India-heritage service providers today face increasing delays in getting visa approvals to staff the critical transition phases of large client projects. TPI has observed that the traditional two to four week window from assignment of an offshore resource to arrival at the US client site is now commonly four to six weeks.
While that may not seem like a significant delay, the problem is that any delay risks derailing implementation schedules that have very little wiggle room. In other words, if the change plan anticipates a two-week turnaround, but the visa delays make it a four-week turnaround, that means the entire project plan is off track.
Sourcing Advisors: Getting Your Money’s Worth
September 14th, 2011By Tony Mataya, ThinkSolutions
We have heard clients comment that their advisors or consultants were either a waste of money, or in other cases an essential and valued part of the team. Why the huge disparity in their perspectives? Questions that clients often ask are whether to use an advisor to assist with sourcing transactions and if so, how can you do it and obtain the most value? How can you make sure the result is the high value scenario instead of the alternative?
Why Retailers are Turning to Outsourcing, in Droves
August 30th, 2011
Our friends at outsourcing consultancy TPI has recently been predicting strong outsourcing demand from the retail sector. Nearshore Americas’ Bob Scheier recently asked TPI Partner and Managing Director Harvey Gluckman what’s sparking the demand and what outsourcers need to meet retailers’ needs.
By Pablo Velasco
With so much focus on service delivery locations within Latin America, it can be easy to overlook what is happening on the buy side for services. Outsourcing by domestic Latin American companies reached the highest level TPI has ever recorded in 2010, and our data and experiences with clients this year suggests the momentum will continue through 2011. We are seeing outsourcing by types of companies that do not fit the traditional Latin American client profile, and we are also seeing new fundamental drivers that are leading companies to outsource.
By Tarun George
“So really, when you get down to it, what is the actual cost of outsourcing?” The fact is that many buyers perform price calculations based on easy and quantifiable metrics that yield pretty graphs, but don’t give the total cost picture of what they’re getting into. And so they often receive nasty surprises six months into their outsourced project, when the numbers add up to more than they budgeted for.
If you’re a buyer who thinks your sourcing decisions should be based on the hourly wage rate, we’re here to tell you different. Labor arbitrage is an important component, but not the only component. Here are some of the main factors that contribute to the Total Cost of Outsourcing.
Client Restructuring Rather than Buying Caused Recent BPO Decline
February 8th, 2011
"Brazil has the lion's share of contract numbers in Latin America" - Mayo
By Tarun George
According to the 2010 fourth quarter TPI Index released recently, the global sourcing industry is sending us some pretty mixed signals. A sluggish economy, smaller contract values, and firms trying to optimize technologies like cloud all make the services marketplace quite unpredictable.
But there are some key trends that emerged, and we asked Mark Mayo, Partner and President at TPI, to help us decipher the numbers. He explains why buyers are renegotiating contracts rather than signing new ones, why BPO activity is down across the board, and what this all means for Latin America.
Don’t Dismiss Shared Services
October 20th, 2010
By Pablo Velasco, Director, CIO Services, TPI; and Scott Furlong, Partner, TPI
Never before have so many services, talented professionals and modern shared services centers been available in Latin America. This new concentration of resources continues to improve the shared services value proposition for many companies in the region.
On average, a new outsourcing shared services center (SSC) or client captive operation has opened about every two weeks in a Latin American country since 2006. So far, this increased supply of SSCs has not stimulated local demand. Most Latin American companies still do not outsource, and very few seek business process outsourcing (BPO) services. Although some barriers to outsourcing remain, most Latin American companies can still benefit from taking advantage of the SSC boom in their own backyard.
Advantages of Consistency
An SSC consolidates one or more back-office activities — such as information technology, …
The Five Most Common Governance Mistakes
July 23rd, 2010By Pablo Velasco, Director, CIO Services, TPI
You don’t get exactly what you pay for in outsourcing relationships (see our earlier article on value leakage), but exactly what you will get depends on how you manage the relationship. Governance is the single-most important variable to the value anoutsourcing engagement will provide, and it is also one of the most challenging variables to manage.
TPI: Overall Outsourcing is Flat, But Cloud is Hot
July 20th, 2010HOUSTON, July 20 /PRNewswire/ — TPI, the largest sourcing data and advisory firm in the world and a unit of Information Services Group, Inc. (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), an industry-leading information-based services company, released data today showing that the global outsourcing market is not yet bouncing back as economic uncertainty continues to weigh on corporations around the world.
The 2Q10 Global TPI Index, which measures commercial outsourcing contracts valued at $25 million or more, recorded total contract value (TCV) of $18.1 billion in the second quarter of 2010, down about 13 percent both sequentially and year-over-year. The market in the second quarter exhibited particular softness in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific and IT outsourcing (ITO).
For the first half of 2010, global market TCV of $38.9 billion remained flat with a year …
Stop Leaks from Draining Value
June 11th, 2010
By Lynn McNeal, Partner, TPI; and Gerardo Fernández, Senior Advisor, TPI
Outsourcing can provide many benefits to businesses – including more flexibility, improved service and reduced costs – but it almost never provides these benefits at the levels that are expected. The most successful outsourcing programs typically reach only 95 percent of the service levels and cost savings that were expected – and were contracted for. Less successful programs may miss their targets by 30 percent or more.
The difference between the value and services that are contracted for in an outsourcing agreement, and those that are actually delivered, is known as value leakage. A company’s size and where it is headquartered geographically aren’t major factors it its risk for value leakage. We have seen firsthand that some midsized, Latin American companies are global leaders in managing outsourcing relationships and maximizing the …
