Business Platforms – BPO meets Technology

The different jargons floating around in the outsourcing industry for the evolving new  services model are Platform BPO, Business Services Cloud, Managed Services, SAAS, SAAS + BPO , Software on demand et al. As I had mentioned before, Business Platforms are not just bringing technology( read ERP) and BPO together, but bringing along with it a value-added layer of cloud based managed services. This means deep domain knowledge in an horizontal functional area and /or, vertical industry process area  is successfully configured and encrypted on to a technology tool along with hosting of the same.

The value for the customer comes from the ability to get complete managed services on cloud on tap from a single service provider. The ability to benefit from significant standardization & multi-tenancy co-existing  with personalization layer brought through the value added services and augmented tool  layer.
For example, managing the Order-to-Cash cycle in a newspaper industry through a Business Platform model brings the power of getting managed services  on cloud specific to the industry process of advertising orders, circulation orders and digital advertisement orders
Business Platform model is where a lot of value comes from a service provider bringing deep domain knowledge of the vertical industry/horizontal  into action by ensuring that the technology backbone in the Business Platform offering is fully leveraged to support the end-to-end business process and any gaps are plugged with value added tool layer .This comes with the entire managed services stack  (Infrastructure , application and business processing services ) serviced on the cloud.

Business Platforms is  the nirvana state on the managed services cloud………

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last 2 months, through my travel across North America and United Kingdom, I experienced clients are well into concept understanding, acceptance and wanting to try out the business platform model of outsourcing. Be it a Head of Shared Services in a large retailer looking for a HR platform, or a Global Head of HR looking for an integrated core HR and payroll Business platform , or a CPO of a large European bank looking for a centralized end-to-end procurement platform, the common driving factor is all about doing more with less. It is about conserving CAPEX dollars and undertaking large scale transformation with a partner who is willing to share the risk by providing a pay-as-you-go option.

As the green shoots emerge from the current downturn, client captains simply cannot afford to follow more of the old outsourcing model and have to try newer ways of optimizing business process & technology bundled together. Business Platforms is fast emerging to be that innovative alternative model, which can help in the bounce back and in driving sustainable business value. Some of the areas of business platforms adoption are in procure-to-pay, hire-to-retire, item data lifecycle management, order-to-cash and in vertical process areas like advertising order management in newspapers, customer relationship management in retail banking, customer billing in telco and claims management in insurance.

Business Platforms is that emerging model which can help clients cascade into the next horizon of outsourcing.

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

eAuctions erupted into sourcing scene with lots of hype later failed to live up to the high expectations, and organizations slowly realized that other modes of negotiations are equally essential as well to sustain healthy supply relationships and cost competitiveness. In many instances we have seen that the over usage of eAuctions ended into fiasco primarily due to lack of supplier acceptance and inability to cut down the cost beyond certain level. This has resulted into many organizations eschewing their eAcution tool and relook at traditional negotiation strategy like RFx, Cost model, Face-to-Face negotiations as well to drive viable & sustainable cost savings, which became important during these tough years when we saw a string of supplier bankruptcies resulting in immense supply chain risk. Having said that organizations in early stages of eAuction adoption curve, for instance in Asia region where eAuction penetration had been low due to cultural reasons, continue to reap initial success and saving benefits. Most of the eSoucing tools available in the market are pretty matured with stable functionality and differentiate very little in terms of attributes.

While evaluating eSourcing tool organization needs to consider two very important factors as well – one: Ease of use, two: Customer and training support. It is vital to keep following in mind while choosing eSourcing tool:
1.      Focus on business aspect than technology superiority: It is important to consider ‘ease of use’ and this need to be from the perspective of internal users as well as external users to accommodate change management on the supplier side also.
2.      Look for business value of feature than just availability: It’s a known fact that organizations typically use only a fraction of functionality available in any package. So the evaluation of solution should be based on business value the feature would actually be providing rather than just availability and complexity.
3.      Effective Customer Support: It is absolutely essential to have support from your eSourcing tool vendor in terms of high responsiveness and resolution of customer queries. This is a key to successfully conduct sourcing event and achieve the end objective.

Fortunately now organizations also has option of managed services for Sourcing which focuses on realized savings as an outcome rather than underlying eSourcing technology and is fast emerging as a generally accepted service model. It is typically on a gain share pricing model – a trend maturing fast in this space.

Posted by Gurjeet at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)