Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Current communication providers will need to revamp their system to handle billing processes for wireless services. Thomas Tunstall, Ph.D., at KPMG Consulting LLC, explains that the revenue streams that have come from voice will increasingly shift to data. Traffic from applications data traveling through the Internet will be usage based, rather than minutes based.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Johnson & Johnson is the largest and most diversified healthcare company in the world. It manufactures world-renowned health care products and provides related services to consumers and pharmaceutical markets, selling products in more than 175 countries. With more than 190 operating companies in 51 nations, the company has more than 99,000 employees worldwide. It’s a human resources migraine, to be sure!
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
No doubt, you’ve seen the ads with the cupped hands ready to cradle your life. With the accompanying slogan, You’re in good hands with Allstate, one would naturally assume that customer satisfaction is a high priority with this insurance company. When it comes to outsourcing, though, you can bet that Allstate is in the good hands of its supplier, EDS. Larry Moser, Senior Marketing Manager at Allstate and Product Manager for its flood and mobile home lines, recalls that a decision was made in 1986 that Allstate would join the Write Your Own Flood Insurance Program. He says the company subsequently looked at its processing operation and realized that writing flood was a lot different from its other lines (auto, life, property) and decided to explore what opportunities there might be for the processing of the flood business.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Imagine that you own a retail gas store and the cash register goes down. You can’t sell gas or Twinkies. Now imagine, just for a moment, that you own over 1700 retail gas stores where this could happen. ARCO, a West Coast gasoline refiner and retailer, actually owns that many gas stores and a large convenience store network. Downtime can be disastrous, so ARCO outsourced its point-of-sale terminals to outsourcer, Getronics. When the Getronics help desk receives a call from one of the retail outlets, the staff diagnoses whether the fix will require a technician. If so, they must obtain the needed part from a depot, dispatch a technician to the site to install the part, and have it up and running within four hours from the time the call was placed — no matter how remote the location might be. It’s truly an extraordinary feat in logistics.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Without a doubt, today’s competitive forces have pushed the role and importance of customer relationship management up to the top rung of the ladder to success for organizations. As it is so vital, it has become a specialized area and an industry in itself. Thomson Consumer Electronics, which manufactures electronic products for the well-known brands of RCA, GE and Proscan, came to understand in the mid 1990s that customer care is a separate skill and a trade apart from manufacturing. We are in the manufacturing business. We wanted to develop a partnership with a company that had expertise in managing a customer care center and call center, recalls Scott Medawar, Manager of Customer Care Operations for Thomson. They began outsourcing these strategic functions to Spherion in 1997. Prior to their agreement, Thomson had operated its own call center and had a relationship with Norell to staff the center (Norell later became Spherion).
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,
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 Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Traditionally, outsourcing has been IT oriented. Today, however, outsourcing is taking three different paths. I see outsourcing falling into three distinct categories: the traditional IT suppliers,† the application service providers (ASP), and the business process outsourcing (BPO) suppliers. Different currents are buffeting each sector. Historically, IBM, EDS and CSCformed the top tier of the IT …
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Compaq buyers want their outsourcing vendors to introduce innovation and add value to their outsourcing contracts, observes Thomas Simmons, vice president, eBusiness Management Services for Compaq Global Services in Stow, Massachusetts. Buyers want their vendors to be part of managing today’s complexity. They want us to think of different ways of doing business that they would never have thought of, he says.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Buyers are interested in transformation, says Joe Ragusa, vice president, Transformational Outsourcing for IBM Global Services, based in Somers, New York. They see outsourcing vendors as change agents who can provide the skills, processes and technology they need to enter the brave new economy. IT is enabling, adds Ragusa. The Web has created some strange bedfellows. Heated competitors are now working together in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges…
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