Business Platforms: Cascading Horizons in Outsourcing
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.
