Research & Insight

Industry

Financial Services & Insurance

Special Recognition For Outstanding Service

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Johnson & Johnson, the largest and most diversified healthcare company in the world. Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s leading investment banks. Boeing Company, a leader in the aerospace industry. Glaxo Wellcome, Inc., a leading research pharmaceutical firm. Rohm and Haas, a specialty chemical company. BP Amoco. Nokia. CNA Insurance. And PSEG, an electric and gas holding company in 13 countries. The roster of satisfied customers of outsourcer, Hewitt Associates, is a Who’s Who of leading world-class companies. Each of those companies recognizes the role their employees play in making their companies successful. They also recognize that their ability to recruit and retain high-caliber employees depends heavily on the benefits programs and quality of human resources services extended to employees.

Getting a Handle on Purse Strings

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Because of its poor position with respect to costs (three years ago), the bank hired Peter Donald, an outsourcing veteran with noted success for the City of Melbourne. ANZ wanted him to identify outsourcing opportunities and to apply his prior successful principles in implementing outsourcing for the bank. Donald recalls that this departure from conservative thinking sparked internal challenges. Although the bank had decreed that something had to be done about its costing structure, there were degrees of tension among management when it came to identifying which opportunities might be selected. The opportunity identified was the bank’s procurement — its sourcing function — because it was not providing the level of strategic importance to the bank that was desired. We spend just under $1 billion Australian dollars per year in Australia and New Zealand (a total of about $1.5 billion worldwide) on a whole range of items from telecommunication to stationary, from technology to marketing and travel,

CRM Becomes A Star At ENSTAR

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

The I Love You virus did very unloving things to the computers of email readers who couldn’t resist opening the infected note. The malicious message did billions of dollars of damage. And an avalanche of email messages brought down Yahoo in a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. These high profile events made companies realize the Internet is full of lurkers and some of them are evil people.

Outsourcing Grows as Economy Slows

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

With the threat of Y2K glitches, many companies delayed outsourcing commitments during the final half of 1999. But companies returned to outsourcing in 2000. Megadeals lit up the landscape, says Bob Pryor, vice president of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY) and head of its Global Operate – Americas outsourcing business in the U.S…

Equity Creates ‘Sticky’ Outsourcing Deals

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Information technology is moving from legacy information into a commodity. This inexorable shift is altering the nature of the relationship between buyer and supplier. That has been a pretty big change in the market last year, says Bob Chaffin, contract manager of IS for General Motors Corp. in Detroit, Michigan. Today, vendors must differentiate themselves in the marketplace and create an important distinction between their value added abilities and the commodity they are selling…

Sorting Through the Rubble

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

New vendors around every corner. Mega deals. Dead dotcoms. And even some fallout from Y2K. They littered the year 2000 battlegrounds in the outsourcing arena. Gartner Dataquest’s Bruce Caldwell, senior analyst-outsourcing, recently completed reports and forecasts from his company’s surveys of end user wants and needs in the world of IT. He says the turmoil in the IT services marketplace this past year was a factor in a dip in the IT services revenue that had been forecasted for 2000.

2001: An Ecommerce Odyssey

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

This year will be the year of ecommerce outsourcing. But the seeds were sown last year, according to Richard Raysman, a partner at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner LLP, a law firm in New York City specializing in outsourcing. Last year startups popped up and new ecommerce companies gained market share. Raysman mentions i2, Commerce One and Ariba as three relative newcomers that last year proved they could be enormously successful in the ecommerce arena…

Outsourcing’s New Risks

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Academic: Professor James Brian Quinn Outsourcing’s New Risks By Beth Ellyn Rosenthal Today, the greatest risk in outsourcing is to not outsource. So says James Brian Quinn, William and Josephine Buchanan Professor of Management emeritus at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. Without outsourcing, companies can’t keep up, observes Quinn. The second biggest risk today is to keep innovation in-house, continues the professor. He calls the idea of assigning all corporate innovation in-house a macho shibboleth. Today, the most successful companies use outsourcing for innovation. He cites Dell Computer and Cisco Systems as leaders in their fields who rely on their suppliers to do the development work.

When the Government Comes Calling

Raymond Angus

This question is important to the solvency of any organization, but it is crucial to those companies doing business with the federal government, says George Phares, President of Strategic Direction Resource, Inc. For seven years, Phares’ company, based in Houston, Texas; has specialized in auditing human resources for federal contractors. Why, you may ask, do human resources need auditing? Because once a year, each federal contractor is required to file a compliance report with the government…

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