When two companies merge, a flurry of negotiation begins. Often watching from the sidelines are clients whose outsourcing relationships can be hacked away in no time by the acquiring company’s executive sword. How can you salvage outsourcing relationships in the midst of a merger?
Gloom and doom seem to be the operative adjectives as the U.S.’s longest running economic boom ends. In this seemingly bottomless free fall, outsourcing is becoming an important option for businesses determined to shore up their bottom lines by cutting costs as demand for their products and services slows.
As healthcare professionals strive to focus on their core competencies and become more efficient and cost-effective, they turn to outsourcing as a solution. Buenaventura Medical Group (BMG), a 50-doctor, multi-specialty group with five locations and 100,000 patients, made that decision five years ago. In efforts to stay ahead of their competition, they realized that printing and mailing their patient statements was sorely in need of process improvement.
Managing the infrastructure of information technology is critical to federal government agencies. The maintenance and operation of tens of thousands of desktop computers, the software that drives them and the networks that connect them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, can be likened to the proverbial millstone tied around the neck of government agencies. Outsourcing the management of these computer seats often can combat this drain on resources, saving both time and money.
Outsourcing operations themselves do not vary greatly across national borders. But multinational outsourcing efforts are often challenged by geographic distance and differences in national laws and customs. Sodexho Alliance, whose services range from Paris’s Seine River cruise catering to prison cafeteria staffing, has overcome those hurdles. The company finalized its merger with the former American hotel group Marriott on June 18th, 2001 to make Sodexho Alliance a global outsourcing model.
It’s an IT contract negotiator’s dream – to enter talks with detailed cost data about each activity involved in a comprehensive business process outsourcing (BPO) deal. Armed with this cost data, negotiation starts with how the service provider can beat internal costs for performing the process activities, ensuring that the business case proves positive, or at the very least, break even.
Three factors in today’s global, competitive economy increase the demand for outsourcing: Technological change, Technology management, Business change.
Hedging its bets, The Venetian added a button to its home page to solve that problem. The button immediately connects the guest to a live customer service agent at the hotel using either the guest’s computer or an available phone. This service, called Push to Talk, is offered by ITXC, a Princeton, New Jersey application service provider.
Corporations considering outsourcing to an application service provider (ASP) should be cognizant of two key legal issues in the outsourcing contract: performance and liability. They are headline issue because, with an ASP, the customer has less immediate control over the software application, the hardware on which it runs and, importantly, its own data.
Real estate today is not about doing deals. People are getting over their ‘edifice complex,’ quips Deborah Kops, global lead, real estate process outsourcing for PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PWC) Global Outsourcing Group. She says a sea change is occurring in the industry as companies realize real estate is a form of business process outsourcing that can create profits.
At LaQuinta, the inbound call center has been an outsourced function since 1996. Jackie Burke, Vice President of Reservation Services for LaQuinta, says the company has no reservations — that is, no doubts or misgivings — about its choice of outsourcing supplier for this extremely important function.
When a company outsources its customer relationship management (CRM), how do its executives know their customers will receive the best service their company has to offer, if its own employees aren’t actually offering the service?
How IT Asset Management Affects the Bottom Line – What are the tactical steps and essential elements involved in an effective program for IT life cycle asset management? This paper examines those guidelines; the trends and business issues driving the process; and proven, highly successful solutions.
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