Travelers flying in and out of Salt Lake City International Airport love to buy Utah T-shirts. Before switching to a hosted retail software solution, the Air Terminal Gifts stores frequently ran out of stock, thereby losing sales. Today the warehouse delivers stock to stores running low before they run out. Hosting also eliminated both the corporate and store servers.
In 2001, Sabre Holdings evaluated options to reduce its sales and distribution costs. But the company also wanted to minimize the risk of having all its IT knowledge in one region. Its first offshoring relationship was with NIIT. That has been so successful Sabre has since opened its own captive centers in Poland, India, Argentina, and Uruguay. This story relates the benefits of this model.
Dr. Christian Baader, SAP vice president, is one of the architects of SAP’s unique BPO partnering model with service providers. Read why Dr. Baader thinks the BPO market is bipolar, why BPO should become more like automobile manufacturing, and what the movie The Bucket List can teach everyone.
Cost is only one reason to outsource to Vietnam. Other advantages are a low attrition rate, a cultural penchant for perfection, and a strong work ethic. That’s why Verint continues to increase its work with CSC Vietnam.
In a true outsourcing partnership, each player contributes to the well-being of the relationship. But sometimes the buyer goes the extra mile to take care of the supplier. Read how Ping Identity worked with Luxoft’s engineers to create the best possible outcomes.
How do buyers and suppliers structure healthy outsourcing relationships? What steps should they take to avoid the doom loop? Siemens Medical Solutions’s Jim Way shares his insights.
ITO 1.0 was largely a move to low-cost-labor countries. Cheap labor was the central tenet, says Timothy Chou of Openwater Networks. He maintains ITO 2.0 is not about sending work to the cheapest supplier; instead, it’s about moving the work to where the best brains are. That’s why his company selected Augmentum to write its software.
Pegasus Capital Advisors, a private equity firm, is operating in today’s uncertain financial markets. Instead of doing strategic work, the CFO found he lost whole days dealing with employee problems, since he was also responsible for HR, too. Outsourcing to ADP TotalSource not only saved time but also gave the firm’s employees more benefits, which became a great recruiting tool.
John McKenna is chief strategy and services officer for CompuCom, a $1.7 billion IT service provider. The company currently manages more than 2.3 million seats; its help desk agents answer almost three million calls a year. McKenna discusses how to select an IT provider and create a successful ITO relationship.
ABB Inc., a technology manufacturer, grew by acquisitions. In 1995 ABB wanted to create a single culture with centralized processes and policies. It decided the best way to do this was outsource. Its first step: centralizing its 401(k) plan. Today, 13 years later, ABB has outsourced many of its HR processes to its original supplier: Fidelity HR Services.
How do you hire 1,000 human resource employees ASAP when you’re the untested new kid on the block? That was the challenge Visteon Corporation faced right before Ford spun off the automobile parts manufacturer. Manpower Business Solutions helped the newcomer fill its roster and cut its time to hire 50 percent.
Overhead Door Corporation’s Genie call center gets 55,000 plaintive calls a month. The manufacturer outsourced its call center operations unsuccessfully to two different U.S. suppliers. So it decided to bring the call center function in-house and hired Veritude to populate it…which it did 30 days early because the incumbent supplier abruptly decided to close its doors. Here’s the story.
Like many promotional products manufacturers, The GEM Group has a manufacturing facility in China. The manufacturer was changing its IT desktop infrastructure. Did the computers in Shenzhen have enough memory to work in the new IT environment? Everdream’s application allows GEM to manage the Chinese infrastructure from its Massachusetts headquarters.
When Private Escapes Destination Clubs started its travel and real estate company, it wanted IT expertise without the IT investment. So it outsourced its Web-based reservation system to Managed Business Solutions. The IT platform was such a stellar success a competitor came calling, attracted by the reservation system. Now the new combined entity is the No. 2 player.
Online customers communicate through email. But some want to do things the old-fashioned way–they want to talk to a real person about their needs. Small entrepreneurs with day jobs can’t answer their calls during the workday. Outsourcing provides a professional alternative.
What a year! Wipro set up shop in the United States. This year’s subprime mortgage mess will actually help outsourcing next year. And non-traditional suppliers won some big outsourcing deals. Here’s what it all means and a guess at how these events might impact the industry in the next 12 months.
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