Deciding What to Outsource
Dr. Wendell Jones
Outsourcing relationships have a better chance for success if they have an internal champion who believes in the cause. Find out what you need to know.
Research & Insight
Function
An ASP Plays Doctor with Database Health
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
dbDoctor has reengineered the database monitoring process for Oracle and Sun Microsystems systems. ‘Databases touch each and every facet of your business. When they go down, all hell breaks loose and losses immediately start to accumulate,’ says Michael Misheff, vice president, sales and marketing, for dbDoctor.
Prepared to Answer
Chris Pryer, Business Writer
Customer service is a term that rolls easily off the tongue of almost every corporate mogul you hear interviewed or quoted these days. They talk about the fierce competition they face in their chosen industry and that the distinguishing factor that separates the leaders in their field from the also-rans is how they service their customers after the sale. In the remote environment of eCommerce, it can be particularly difficult to maintain a satisfying relationship between the buyer and seller, whether it’s B2C or B2B. This has spawned a whole new generation of companies that specialize in helping other companies manage interaction with their customers over the Internet. Ziptone is such a company.
Outsourcing:
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Outsourcing providers offer a richer and more varied career path than companies whose employees work in departments that support the core business. When EDS completes an outsourcing contract, it manages the IT department of the buyer’s firm.
Real Estate Outsourcing Focuses on Transactions, Not the Transaction
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
An Interview With Deborah Kops – Location, location, location is the number one rule of commercial real estate. For corporations worried about their bottom lines, the cardinal concern for their real estate should be process, process, process.
HR Moves to Self-Serve
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
SynHRgy HR Technologies, an HR outsourcing vendor in Houston, Texas, monitored the usage of its 500,000 participants last fall. Sixty-five percent of the enrollees used the Web or its interactive voice response (IVR) system in lieu of talking to a live representative, reports Kraig Koester, Midwest regional director for SynHRgy. He points out the outsourcing vendor’s 35 clients range from high tech companies who couldn’t live without their Palm Pilots to unionized heavy industry whose employees work with their hands not computers.
Rendezvous with ELLA
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Clark explains that, prior to Rockwood, he was selling an insurance product called employment practices liability (EPL), whereby companies can be insured for wrongful termination, sexual harassment and discrimination. These acts were considered to be uninsurable before 1992 because they were things people did on purpose. But the laws changed, and Clark set about creating awareness that there was an insurance product available for these exposures. Even as he sought ways to promote EPL, he was also trying to reduce the risk of writing a company that would turn out to have bad employment practices.
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 …
As Safe as Fort Knox
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Ruesch specializes in business-to-business cross-border payments, basically supplying various payment instruments and foreign currencies for companies that need to pay their bills in various countries around the world.
Nobody Does It Better
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Quickly growing. Unlimited potential. Unpredictable. Each of these words conveys the business environment in Russia today. Global executives eye developments in the world’s largest country and speculate on each aspect of the emerging business scene.