Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Learn how the choice of an outsourcing partner is crucial in transforming a company’s catch-as-catch-can or by-the-seat-of-your-pants processes to world-class operations.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Just knowing the objectives you want to achieve by outsourcing is not enough. You have to build a strong relationship. Here’s the story of innovative first steps taken to ensure the Bank had the right partner and that the parties won’t be having any tug-of-war incidents.
Daniel Masur, Partner, Mayer, Brown & Platt
We all watched the dotcoms become dot bombs. But you still want to do business with one. Here’s how to structure your contract to lower the risk.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
The plane that crashed into the Pentagon wiped out every accounting record for the entire year for one military service. Data warehousing can rebuild those records overnight.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Exult, a human resources (HR) outsourcing vendor, faced a dilemma that is becoming increasingly common in the business process outsourcing (BPO) world. Exult’s global 550 customers are outsourcing their HR operations to the Irvine, California pure play provider. Currently, Exult has HR 18 processes in its Web-based e HR offering. One of those offerings is international assignment services. Exult offers this expatriation service but lacked the technology for it.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Imagine that you own a retail gas store and the cash register goes down. You can’t sell gas or Twinkies. Now imagine, just for a moment, that you own over 1700 retail gas stores where this could happen. ARCO, a West Coast gasoline refiner and retailer, actually owns that many gas stores and a large convenience store network. Downtime can be disastrous, so ARCO outsourced its point-of-sale terminals to outsourcer, Getronics. When the Getronics help desk receives a call from one of the retail outlets, the staff diagnoses whether the fix will require a technician. If so, they must obtain the needed part from a depot, dispatch a technician to the site to install the part, and have it up and running within four hours from the time the call was placed — no matter how remote the location might be. It’s truly an extraordinary feat in logistics.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Been there, done that is not a trite phrase to Skip Stitt, founder and president of Competitive Government Strategies, Inc. His consulting firm assists cities, counties, states and private-sector not-for-profit organizations on outsourcing and privatization. From experience, he knows it’s vital that government entities base their strategic decisions on best practices, for he was once a buyer. As chief operating officer and senior deputy mayor for the City of Indianapoli…
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
How to Select an ASP Supplier… The path a buyer should take in selecting an ASP depends on the buyer’s intent for use of the outsourced application. Adam Braunstein, Senior Research Analyst with the Robert Frances Group, explains that the buyer could use an ASP to host a full-blown integrated application set, or it could use an ASP as an automation tool for a simple application that doesn’t need to pull information from external systems. Despite the intended use of the application, Braunstein, suggests there are crucial characteristics to seek in an ASP supplier.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Executives who know how to fix computer code but also understand the IRS code are the people who run reSOURCE Partner associates (rSP), an ASP supplier in Columbus, Ohio. The two-year-old firm, which specializes in both the technical and the business side of applications, provides complete application hosting, application management and business process outsourcing using PeopleSoft’s Human Resources and Financial applications. (The firm selected PeopleSoft after an extensive one-year search in 1996.).
Dr. Eelko L.P. van Leeuwen
Outsourcing changes are usually linked to developments in the computer industry. In the past, mainframe operations have been the dominant way in which a company runs its information technology (IT). So consequently, outsourcing has drifted towards farming out entire computer centers. With more decentralized operations, such as LANs and WANs, the possibilities of selective outsourcing has become reality, opening the door to multiple vendors and the outsourcing of different environments. This leads to the question of whether to choose best-in-class providers or single integrators.
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