Outsourcing processes are well-established and well-embedded in today’s organizations. That’s because the history of outsourcing is fairly rich — some global airlines like British Airways were outsourcing their business processes to companies in New Delhi in the 1980s. Yet, there isn’t a CIO around who won’t have a disaster story to narrate on their outsourcing [...]
16th Annual Outsourcing Excellence Award Winner 2012—Best New Process/Application: Rio Tinto and Infosys Rio Tinto is a leading international mining group, and at almost 200,000 invoices a month, is one of the largest global accounts payable operations around. Until 2009, these payables were handled in house, by separate regional onshore teams in five different countries, [...]
Renewing and renegotiating outsourcing relationships is a great learning experience about what can go wrong in a relationship. One prevalent characteristic is the informality of the provider/customer relationship in long-standing relationships. Contracts that have been in place seven-ten years often lapse into an informality that has the provider acting more as an internal IT department [...]
Customer experience has become a powerful differentiator for organizations of all sizes and types. In today’s ultra-competitive market, businesses must strive to deliver exemplary customer service across all touchpoints and via a proliferating array of channels. With customers becoming more demanding every day – and given the fact that dissatisfied customers often will take their business over to [...]
Can you even remember what it was like to have to be in a “place” to make a call? When a flat tire meant a search for a pay phone? When email was something that accumulated between Friday and Monday, until the office computer was powered back on? It’s hard to believe that when the [...]
With the rate of technical and business change increasing through the foreseeable future, outsourcing contract renegotiations have become the new normal. Clients and providers must now develop outsourcing contract renegotiation skills as part of their core competencies in order to ensure the provider’s services are aligned with the client’s needs in terms of price and [...]
At the most basic level, the challenge with change management is that everyone knows it’s important, even that it’s make or break to the success of outsourcing engagements, but very few actually know what it is or how to do it. Even the most outsourcing-sophisticated organizations fall short in their change management activities. Sourcing change [...]
In June 2011 I was interviewing the COO of a California-based bank as part of an application strategy engagement. At the end of the conversation, he asked if Alsbridge had any data on the number of contracts in which the client repatriated all of the services. My answer was, “Off hand I don’t know, but [...]
When you begin evaluating service providers the basic requirements are straightforward. You want a provider with expertise in your industry, a deep understanding of your processes and a proven track record of superior delivery. The provider should be responsive, communicate clearly and demonstrate that it wants your business. However, because these are table stakes in [...]
Most of us have been down on our knees praying that the relationship does not blow up over an error. Perhaps the cutover was delayed because the provider did not conduct sufficient user acceptance tests, or an employee committed fraud within a client account because controls were inadequate, or the client did not provide the [...]
Many buyers of outsourcing services encounter difficulties in realizing the full benefit of their outsourcing relationships. In this paper, sourcing advisor firm Alsbridge identifies buyer attributes that lead to underachievement of outsourcing value and discusses how those attributes relate to mistakes in governance. The information covers such areas as guidance in product development, ownership of [...]
The bulk of most companies’ operational costs are in manpower, says Ragu Bhargava, CEO of Global Upside, Inc., a finance and accounting (F&A) service provider. That’s one of the reasons companies in all industries are increasingly bucking the long-held practice of retaining full-time F&A staff in house. Mountain View, Calif,-based Global Upside, Inc. provides services [...]
There’s no shortage of methodologies and advisories on best practices and risk mitigation strategies for the transition phase of outsourcing relationships. Even so, many buyers encounter situations they didn’t foresee when structuring their arrangement, which cause costs to rise and delay time to value. Outsourcing Center studied these types of situations by surveying companies nominated [...]
Ask 10 buyers of outsourcing services for their keys to success in communicating with their service providers, and you’ll hear 10 different answers because, of course, the effectiveness of communication depends on the individuals involved. Some will also say it depends on whether they’re communicating about day-to-day operations, conflicts or opportunities. Others will comment that [...]
At the point where outsourcing service providers or their customers have a conflict that will result in a monetary loss to either party, they’re walking a fine line. If they manage to resolve the issue with a mutually beneficial solution, their relationship will be even stronger than before the conflict. If not, the party that [...]
Organizations that turn to outsourcing to achieve their business objectives first develop a business case that includes such components as cost savings and avoidance objectives, business value benefits, and risk assessment of potential negative impacts. But what happens when the initial business case stops working because of unanticipated impacts? Both a Deloitte Consulting study and [...]
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