Manufacturing & Hi-tech Archives

Winning Approach to BPO: Be Flexible, Stay Involved, Commit for the Long Term

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

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, …

Transforming Supply Chain Management with RFID

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Some years ago, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) was going to bring supply chain management to the next level. Retailers like Target, Metro Cash & Carry and Walmart adopted it, only to discover that there were several challenges. Integration with SCM was one—tracking everything down to the last part/unit using RFID was turning out to not …

Mobility Shifting the Wave from Brand-centric to Customer-centric Retailing

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Two things are of key importance in the retail industry today: margins and customer loyalty. While better sourcing, operational efficiencies and market penetration can check margins, the answers to improving loyalty or even maintaining them are complex. Retailers are increasingly being forced towards tactical solutions, rewarding customers with “money-off” deals. Much of the concept of …

Financial Services: Build those mobile apps before customers dial out

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Innovation unfolding by way of mobile application usage in the financial sector is not totally unexpected: an increasing number of customers are walking around with smart phones, transacting in virtual worlds, accessing information 24X7, changing market dynamics and providing unlimited opportunities. Time has literally begun to translate into money. ComScore (NASDAQ: SCOR) [i] reported earlier …

The World’s Largest Procurement BPO Engagement Realizes Its Vision

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

16th Annual Outsourcing Excellence Awards—Best Financial Services: Deutsche Bank and Accenture The world’s largest procurement BPO engagement has realized its vision. “Working as one cohesive team, we over-delivered on our business case and we’re still on an upward trajectory. Eight years after initiating the largest procurement BPO engagement in the world, we’re here, we’re successful and …

“Let’s Go Shopping:” New Mobility Strategies Entice Consumers Back Into Physical Stores

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

Why go to a store when you can purchase online? Thanks to innovative mobility strategies, consumers will soon have plenty of reasons. Instead of focusing efforts on lackluster mCommerce, retailers are now looking at mobility solutions as a means to enhance their customers’ in-store experiences, drive loyalty and increase per basket sales. “We’re seeing the …

Mobility’s Coming of Age: All Grown Up and Changing Business for the Better

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

Before cloud, mobility was in its infancy—a means of obtaining email, calendar and contacts on the go. People who relied on desktop computers for communication were unchained. For salespeople, this was awesome. But, for the rest of us, the business apps we needed required too much processing power to travel with us. Then, along came …

A Merger, a Consolidation and a Transformation: The Critical First Steps

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

16th Annual Outsourcing Excellence Awards – Best ITO: Towers Watson and Dell Services “The biggest mistake companies make is picking a provider and then treating them like a vendor. You can hire the best company in the world, but if you don’t work with that provider as a team, you are going to fail.”John Dabek, …

Automation: the Key to a Successful Dynamic Enterprise in the "Now Economy&quot

Simon Shah, Redwood

There’s a reason automation solutions are on every business owner’s mind. Today’s business enterprise is in a state of continuous change—the pressure to optimize performance while lowering costs is enormous. The real-time expectations of the ‘now’ economy is no longer limited to manufacturing and shipping but is driven by information services, an increasingly mobile workforce …

Outsourcing and Consolidation Driving the Newspaper Business

John Harney, Business Writer

What if the New York Times replaced Pulitzer Prize winner Gretchen Morgenson, cited for her “trenchant and incisive Wall Street coverage”, with outsourced personnel in India to save four-fifths of her salary? Absurd, you say? Absurd or not, doing so seems to be a developing trend in American newspapers. Though it’s unlikely a writer of …

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