This issue of Outsourcing Journal discusses the heart and soul of outsourcing: cost savings. Although there are other reasons to outsource — the need to focus on a core competency or the desire to standardize your applications platforms to prepare for e-commerce — cost is still the driving force. Are the cost savings real? Many [...]
If you want an outsourcing agreement to be beneficial for both sides, you have to start with a good contract. Great outsourcing contracts happen when you know exactly what you are trying to accomplish, says Bob Chaffin, director of contract management and finance for General Motors’ Information Systems and Services Division in Detroit, Michigan.
In December 1998 the Port Authority made a strategic decision: it had had enough of mainframes. It wanted to take a different route and move to client/server applications off an NT server. So Bertocci and her staff decided to outsource all its mainframe applications. These include financial, human resources, payroll, scheduling, vehicle dispatch and vehicle maintenance.
Acer Inc., the world’s third largest manufacturer of personal computers, knew it had to make some major infrastructure changes to compete in today’s connected world. It was operating six distinct networks that couldn’t share information. What it needed was a single Web-based, real time, e-commerce network.
Initially, the e-commerce world was peopleless; there was a manufacturer and a consumer and almost no one in-between. Ironically, it is becoming clear that what is going to separate successful companies from unsuccessful ones in the evolving e-commerce world will be people. Outsourcing makes this possible.
When asked how the cost of outsourcing transactions can be reduced, Dennis McGuire, president of Technology Partners International, says that the most problematic area occurs before the contract is signed. The largest source of costs, he explains, lies within the process of negotiating the contract…
Cost pressures continue to intensify as the Internet sets off a seismic shift in the global marketplace. Reducing the costs of an outsourcing transaction becomes an increasingly important component of the contract process. How can clients save money?
It’s rare for a customer to have the opportunity to renegotiate an outsourcing contract. Last year Tom Rideout rewrote two. Rideout, who heads technology delivery for Johns Manville, a building materials company in Denver, Colorado, was delighted with the opportunity to correct some problems with the original contracts..
When Claude Hartridge makes a BPO presentation to the CEOs of some of Europe’s biggest multinationals, the cost benefits are the factor that typically turns their heads. When Hartridge, BPO Business Development Leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers in London, projects an outsourcing contract can shave anywhere from 25 percent and more of their back office costs, they pay attention.
Coleman sees the Web as one way to make benefits administration easier for everyone. Employees of Coleman’s customers can have secure access to their company’s Web site, which contains a host of information about the company’s benefits program. Everyone always wants to know what their health plan covers, the executive notes. Firms have scanned in their benefits books so employees can peruse it on-line.
How can companies get a 10 percent improvement in purchasing supply costs in the next 10 years? Phillip Carter, director of the Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies (CAPS) at Arizona State University in Tempe, will spend the next two years answering that question. Outsourcing, he predicts, will be a significant strategy for businesses to achieve cost savings of that magnitude…
The U.S. Armed Services currently are miles ahead of the rest of the federal government in outsourcing non-core functions to the private sector. Still, the decision of what to outsource is not that plain.
Businesses routinely use their economic resources on an ‘as needed’ basis. Why not do the same for employees? asks Erik Vonk. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Randstad North America, a human resources outsourcing firm based in Atlanta, Georgia…
The Internet is dismantling the industrial economy and replacing it with a connected world based on information and technology, observes Kevin Campbell, a partner in the Atlanta office of Ernst & Young. Knowledge workers will replace factory workers as the core labor force as the world adapts to this new way of doing business.
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