Research & Insight

Collaboration

Getting Hitched

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

How can you minimize risks when selecting a fairly new company as your supplier? Here’s what BP and Bank of America did when they outsourcing their HR to Exult.

Delivering the Difference

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

If you’re a patient in the emergency room, you definitely want that hospital or trauma center to have all the necessary supplies on hand — from IVs and blood plasma to bandages and syringes. But the hospital can’t keep everything on hand; it’s in the patient care business, not inventory warehousing. So the doctors and nurses rely on medical distributors to be sure they have what’s needed — or can deliver it in a couple of hours for an emergency. Many of them depend on Owens & Minor, Inc. (O&M) and, in outsourcing their supplies process to O&M, they enjoy the added advantage of reduced costs.

Coping with Increased Development Cycles

Jerri L. Ledford, Business Writer

In the world of packaged software, upgrades usually happen about once a year, sometimes less, and those upgrades are usually pretty extensive. But in the world of an application service provider (ASP), one of the benefits of offering a centrally located application is the ability to upgrade more frequently. And because upgrades can be performed without disturbing a user’s systems, they can be done on a more direct, incremental basis.

The New Sodexho Alliance:

Joyce Ahlering

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.

Can One Size Fit All?

Chris Pryer, Business Writer

MERANT ASaP Revolutionizes the ASP Model – MERANT ASaP provides the complex development tools utilized by software developers to create eBusiness applications. Via the Internet, MERANT allows distributed software development teams the ability to share a single, hosted resource that can store software code and track and archive all changes during the development process. And because their tools are Web-enabled, the a in ASaP, according to Keith White, MERANT’s V.P. and general manager of ASP, is a play on words with an emphasis on the speed of delivery, that we’re able to deliver solutions . . . immediately. A sort of ASP ASAP.

The Big Picture

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Solutions for Public and Private eMarketplaces “Major multinational companies will buy software solutions,” says James Hatcher, vice president of business development for ECNet. “But when you go to the supplier base, only 10 percent of them will buy software. So what do you do with the rest of the guys? An eMarketplace needs to scale …

Twilight Time

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

The rumormongers and journalists who quickly pen sensational bad-news headlines would have you believe that Exchanges and B2B Marketplaces (last year’s newest Internet darlings) all failed and died practically overnight. They pronounce judgments on why it happened: the hype made businesses adapt the model before it was proven; many companies were not willing or able yet to handle the internal processes that go with the technology of such an extended, networked enterprise; buyers didn’t venture beyond their already established list of suppliers, and even that the procurement folks didn’t coordinate with the planning/administrative folks in many companies.

SRM Alliances

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Supply and demand. This mission-critical component of business has shifted from price and availability to collaboration. Meta Group predicts the SRM market will be $32 billion by 2003. SRM tools enable supply planning so that there is instant visibility across the extended supply chain, allowing companies to drive inventory out; with collaboration, order management becomes a match between demand and capacity.

Strategic Alliance Provides Missing Piece

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.

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