Research & Insight

Vendor Management

The Seven Deadly Sins of BPO and How to Avoid Them

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The concept is relatively simple: instead of hiring employees to handle the necessary but non-core, transaction-based business functions in your company, pass these on to someone else. Where’s the room for BPO mistakes? Here’s the thing: BPO is not like dropping off your dirty clothes at the dry cleaner and having …

The Do’s and Don’ts of Payroll Outsourcing

Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer

Payroll outsourcing is an excellent way to improve accuracy, streamline processes and offload time-consuming, often tedious tasks to a proven specialist. While the service is designed to simplify life for the client company (and the people in it), without careful planning or adherence to some best practices, the whole thing can get a little complicated. …

Why is Outsourcing Innovation So Hard? Here’s How to Make the Impossible Possible!

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Talk to most outsourcing buyers at the outset of their engagements and innovation is always on their wish list. Talk to them two or three years later, and the one thing they wish they had gotten is innovation. The lack of innovation in outsourcing seems to be one the few things they are unhappy about. …

The F&A Forecast: 14 Challenges and Six Solutions

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

The finance and accounting function, along with HR, have traditionally been the BPO processes that companies testing the waters of outsourcing get wet with first. Today “transactional outsourcing has been leveled to a simple commodity,” says Michael J. Alfonsi, Managing Director, BancTec Financial Transaction Services. So what are FAO’s challenges 20 years later? Processes are …

Five Steps to Customizing Service Level Agreements

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Today’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not simple documents that define the duration and the service to be delivered against a timetable with a handful of pre-determined performance parameters. Rather, they are documents that include cleverly negotiated customization, additional provisions, provider and buyer obligations, reporting methodologies, penalties and rewards. A well-crafted and customized SLA document …

What Causes Outsourcing Failures?

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

One of the questions that continue to hound buyers and providers of outsourcing is how to mitigate the risk of failure. This is despite a longer history of outsourcing than you would suspect—outsourcing can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. For 150 years, until 1900, industry in Europe outsourced its requirements. Functions like accounting …

The Pros and Cons of Single and Multiple IT Providers: Competitive Tension versus Accountability

Frank Usher, Managing Consultant

When considering sourcing alternatives for IT services, buyers must make a fundamental decision on structure. Do you want a single IT provider or multiple IT providers? Both have their pros and cons. Neither of the approaches is wrong. But each presents unique challenges, both in operations and in provider management. When IT outsourcing initially evolved, …

Fabric Data Centers: The End of Complex, Expensive and Inefficient Infrastructure

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

What’s new in the data center? Last year, the buzz was around “fabric data centers” as organizations began to worry about costs. Did it make sense to have dedicated and expensive network, computing and storage resources around applications even if the IT infrastructure was outsourced? Could IT infrastructure costs be brought down? CIOs were under …

Beyond Automation: The Importance of Human Analytics in Social Media Monitoring

Anand Chopra, Ph.D., Research & Analytics, Wipro BPO

Mobile networking. Online games. Social computing. As personal and professional worlds collide, social media is generating huge amounts of unstructured data that’s brimming with business insights — from consumer preferences to competitor activities. That’s why many companies are using social media monitoring tools to “listen” to these conversations. These automated tools — from firms such …

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