Transition | Outsourcing Center

Cultivating a High Yield in Outsourcing

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

The fourth largest steel company in the U.S., National Steel manufactures steel for the automotive, construction and tin container industries and has annual shipments of almost six million tons of flat rolled products. The company outsourced the housing and operation of its mainframe and data center services to IBM in November 1998 with a seven-year contract worth nearly $60 million. John Davis, CIO of National Steel, explains that they wanted to reallocate its human resources to solve National Steel problems, rather than technology problems. I wanted them working on solutions that would differentiate National Steel from other steel competitors, he says. The company has accomplished that and other goals, and their agreement has yielded far more than they asked for. But, after all, National Steel is no novice to outsourcing. In the 1980s, National Steel spun off its data center (which then became a part of ACS).

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,

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.

Time to Renegotiate

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

From 1992 to 1994, many major corporations signed 10-year outsourcing contracts. The end of the tunnel is in sight, but now, the world is much different with the rise of the Internet. Robert Zahler, a partner with Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C., says many of these buyers are beginning to gear up and decide what to do in this new business environment. They are wrestling with the choice of renegotiating with their current suppliers or putting the contract out for a competitive bid…

Producing The Nation’s Paychecks On Time

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

If you are a salaried employee in the Netherlands, there’s a 50-50 chance that Pink Roccade produces your paycheck. If we are one day late, there’s a big economic problem, says Hans Kateman, communication manager for Pink Roccade, an IT outsourcing supplier in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.

13 Big Mistakes to Avoid

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Bill Bierce is in the catbird seat when it comes to watching outsourcing agreements go south. The founder of Bierce & Kenerson, P.C., a New York law firm specializing in outsourcing and technology law, has devised a lucky list of how to raise the odds on outsourcing success…

Contracting With ASP’s What’s the Customer to Do?

George Kimball

Application service providers (ASP’s) promise to make all this go away. Rather than pay large license fees and hire swarms of consultants, companies may rent the software, or buy applications by the drink, paying so much per user, per month. Applications will be delivered to the desktop, over the Internet. Just pay the money, and someone else will buy, install, connect and configure everything. The allure is plain, and has aroused interest in the marketplace, and from service providers, including well-financed startups, as well as such stalwarts as Intel and Oracle. The appeal is especially strong to new and smaller companies, who can adopt standard functions from popular packages more easily than larger, long-established organizations.

E-voking E-commerce E-mmediately

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Companies today realize that if they want to stay in business they will have to enter the e-commerce fray. Specifically, they must embrace Internet Protocol (IP) based technologies. If you want to be in business, you need to be in e-business, says Elena Christopher, senior analyst at Gartner DataQuest in Egham, England…….

Anatomy of an Outsourcing Decision

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Why do companies outsource today? Until the arrival of the Internet, the answer was clearly cost. But the new economy is making new demands. How has a world moving at Web speed altered the way companies decide to outsource? (outsourcing)

Seamless International Outsourcing

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

The buyer and the supplier are just five hours apart by car. But from a business standpoint, they couldn’t be farther apart. The customer’s management grew up in capitalist western Europe. The suppliers’ formative years were spent in Communist eastern Europe. How do you fashion an outsourcing relationship that works?

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