Discuss trends and ideas on the convergence of Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Find out how you can benefit from adopting a managed services delivery model, and learn more about how the bundling of consulting, technology and BPO services can transform your organization.

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March 07, 2010

Business Platforms: It is all about when and where you want to make the shift

The business platform model is clearly emerging as the front runner choice for client corporations to manage their outsourced services (IT & Business Process). There is still a considered and well thought through shift which customers need to make. Continued incremental approach and getting wedded to the sunk cost is indeed a hurdle to jump over. This would need a mindset change, the ability to look ahead, see the curve coming and the ability to change lanes to make the shift without business discontinuity.

I am reminded of the elevated expressway (to Electronic City - the Silicon Hub of India) of 9kms which is now operational and is used by us

Continue reading "Business Platforms: It is all about when and where you want to make the shift" »

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 01:49 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 15, 2010

Multiply your supplier collaboration effort using Platform

I had an interesting comment in one of my blog entry that  - we need to be cognizant of the fact that while supplier consolidation offer better negotiation power and control on supplies in addition of host of other benefits, there is another school of thought that drives de-risking of supplies by using more suppliers’. While there’s no one-size-fit-all approach while attempting supplier rationalization (read consolidation)  in the present economic environment it is also important to have a rigorous supplier risk management plan in place while taking a decision on supplier rationalization. On one hand the idea of supplier rationalization is extremely effective in improving relationship with a focused supplier base and thus helping you in increasing your sourcing effectiveness, I have also seen instances where organization after consolidating its supply base continue the business-as-usual with the remaining suppliers attempts no improvement in collaboration, partnership or try to come out with a new road map and such supplier rationalization is certainly not good for organization’s health in the long term.

Continue reading "Multiply your supplier collaboration effort using Platform" »

Posted by Gurjeet at 01:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 12, 2010

Business Platforms: laying the foundation for the future agile enterprise

As I see more clients onboard and go-live on  Business Platforms [Bundle of Process, Technology (Application + Infra) and People delivered through a managed services model] – it is becoming obvious that they have in one significant paradigm shift moved from the motley baggage of applications and splintered processes of the past to a new simplified and harmonized  end-to-end process, supported by a single platform and with trained people provided by a single provider.

This is like  a whiff of fresh air, which will be the stepping  foundation for their future success, agility and growth. To bring this to life, a recent client who moved onto the HRO platform, now realizes the significantly enhanced and empowered employee experience been created for their associates.

Continue reading "Business Platforms: laying the foundation for the future agile enterprise" »

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 07:59 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 29, 2010

Platform innovation for effective change management

Imagine a situation wherein you are leaving for a business trip at a short notice for an important business event. You have checked-in at the airport, well settled in your seat for a 24 hours flight and now comfortably seated on a reclined cushioned seat with refreshment on the tray, gazing at your favorite business magazine on an article you have been yearning to read for weeks and now only you have got free time. Suddenly … a flight attendant approach you to exchange your seat with some other passenger and you are suddenly in a discomfort zone with your mental harmony completely shattered. All in all, you would require considerable effort on your part to get you back on track and get into your comfort zone again. Imagine if this change is happening when aircraft is passing through a turbulent storm and now not only your effort to settle down will be much more intensive you would also feel unsettled for a long time in a unproductive mode.

Continue reading "Platform innovation for effective change management" »

Posted by Gurjeet at 01:58 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 22, 2010

Leveraging Business Platforms To Drive Higher Business Value

As more market awareness, client interest and new deals start playing out in the market place for Business Platforms, it is imperative to understand that this new engagement model clearly can unleash phenomenal business value.

Some of the areas of business value unleashed by Business Platforms are:

  1. Simplifying process, technology and people experience with an easier or robust governance model provided by a single partner
  2. Builds the Foundation for growth, both organic and inorganic
  3. Enhancing Employee, Supplier and Customer experience with higher empowerment & self sufficiency
  4. Continuous benchmarking on both efficiency and effectiveness dimensions to ensure the process supported by the platform is best-in-class
  5. Higher level of sustainability by creating significant optimization of resource consumption (e.g infra)

Overall, the Business Platform model adoption has the potential to  unleash phenomenal business value to customers for sustainable growth and profitability.

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 11:10 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 08, 2010

Leveraging Business Platforms to become a Smart Enterprise

As we march into the new year with the strengthening green shoots of global recovery, client corporations enter into their planning for this year and the next decade. Business Platforms which is the nirvana state of managed services in cloud will clearly emerge to be the new business model for the next decade.

While they are already a few early  adopters for this model, we believe the rapid adoption will come from those clients corporations which are not wedded to their sunk cost. We expect fortune 300–2000 to be the pioneers in adoption of the new model. The fortune 300 will also adopt the platform model in emerging markets and geographies and in the areas where renewal opportunities come by. The business model makes the client corporation  become a smarter enterprise, simplify their processes & technology landscape and enhance their agility to respond to the market opportunities.

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 12:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 06, 2010

Unified technology is vital for managing Supply Risk effectively

The rapid embracing of globalization during last few decades has created an extremely profitable complex network business environment and on the other hand it has also made the global supply chain extremely vulnerable to any adverse event even in the remotest part of the world. You may ask any CPO and one of their biggest concerns today is supply continuity without disruptions and organization’s ability to manage any supply disruptions. While prevention is always better than cure, in managing supply risk you actually need a balanced combination of both. Today’s supply chain needs to be much more agile and adaptive to both external & internal events and should have the ability to react quickly to any negative signals popping up anywhere down the supply chain. With slow recovery though the number of bankruptcies have been abated and there’s an ease on liquidity, today’s global supply chain is bound to face newer kind of risks in the form of trade barriers, sustainability regulations, fluctuating currency rates, volatile commodity market etc, which mean that we need to gear up our supply chain eco-system beyond the myopic view of supplier monitoring alone. There’s also a need to evaluate supply risk from a multi-tier perceptive for any risk event at supplier’s supplier supply also that can impact our supply chain, and so access to diverse and fragmented sources of supply information is absolutely critical.

Continue reading "Unified technology is vital for managing Supply Risk effectively" »

Posted by Gurjeet at 10:06 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 16, 2009

Should You Build, Buy, Host, Rent or Managed while addressing your underlying technology?

The emergence of Application software during last few decades has addressed one of the most common business dilemma - ‘buy versus build’ with ‘build’ clearly becoming a default and preferred choice for most of the organizations. However this panacea was short lived and organizations grapple with yet another challenge of heterogeneous and fragment technology landscape multiplied over years. This happened especially in supply chain area where these applications are unable to communicate with each other resulting in sub-optimized underlying technology. While consolidation of different technology applications into a single & common instance is the most common acceptable approach, which however is a costly endeavor in current state of capital crunch. The recent economic downturn has also seen the fast emergence of  yet another option – ‘Rent versus Managed’ riding on cloud computing wave and providing serious options to business and contemplate yet another model to keep pace with adaptive supply chain and remain competitive.

Continue reading "Should You Build, Buy, Host, Rent or Managed while addressing your underlying technology?" »

Posted by Gurjeet at 12:29 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 12, 2009

Vertical Business Platform Services – Pushing the Envelope on the cloud !

Even as early adoption occurs of the Traditional Business Platform services in the enterprise process areas of Procure to Pay, Hire To retire , Order to cash  and Master Data Lifecycle Management, there is more opportunity and traction in vertical industry based Business Platform services.

Some of the Areas are Newspaper-in-a-box – Infosys NiAB offering which focuses on the publishing industry specific processes like circulation orders, advertising Orders and digital Orders. This is a paradigm shift for the capital starved Newspaper industry and allows them the ability to consolidate both operations and technology and also push towards more of managed shared services.

Continue reading "Vertical Business Platform Services – Pushing the Envelope on the cloud !" »

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 02:23 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 30, 2009

Business Platforms are nothing but Managed Services on the Cloud !!

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.

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

October 21, 2009

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.

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

August 27, 2009

Next generation BPO: will drive on tailored standardization

It is now by and large evident that the next generation BPO will happen on more complicated and knowledge based process outsourcing in a much shorter time span, and organization’s objective would be to attain transformational benefit rather than cost savings alone. The ongoing recession has brought some method in the madness towards outsourcing rush wherein service providers are being challenged to articulate value proposition beyond ‘cost savings’ alone as a long term strategy. Today we are seeing plethora of solutions mushrooming in the provider’s offering list even if they are not solution in real sense. The next generation BPO solution has to primarily address:

-‘Standardization’ to drive savings through shared service model from a low cost location and this invariably can’t be achieved unless the underlying technology layer is seamless
-‘Tailoring’ to address client specific nuances in terms of process, language and skills in an integrated fashion to enable client become more agile to external environment.

Standardization and Tailoring, though sounds conflicting necessarily needs to be in optimal balance and its right mix is key to the success of next generation BPO solution. This would also mean that service providers would need to have a good handle on both process and technology while executing outsourcing for much needed aspired transformational benefits.

Posted by Gurjeet at 10:57 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 03, 2009

Business Platform: The Nirvana-State in Cloud

With more & more literature on the cloud as an utility market, which is going through the typical hype cycle, I am increasingly convinced that the Business Platform model is the nirvana-state in cloud.

Why I believe Business Platforms is the end-state in cloud is not only because of the uniqueness in the model in going beyond the infrastructure & application layer, but taking it all the way into the  business process arena along with value-added services & tools. This unleashes phenomenal business value combined with innovative pricing linked with business metrics.

Even as the cloud debate evolves, Business Platforms – the nirvana-state in cloud is there as a business model to stay with early adopters already tapping into the business value.

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 06:10 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 29, 2009

How Source-to-Pay platform can help you achieve transformational savings?

While leading economic indicators are showing sign of slight recovery there’s still a long way to stabilization of economy and get over current uncertainty. Smart organizations are using this challenging environment as an opportunity to drive some of the tough transformation changes while outsourcing which otherwise would have been difficult to implement. Such transformational changes invariably require overhauling of existing process and underlying technology layer to achieve savings beyond traditional ‘lift & shift’. Endured by various hype & bust cycle over last two decades, organizations today are more sensible when it comes to drive the transformation changes instead of looking for panacea to the problems.  Platform BPO being a new concept is going through initial hype cycle and so also need to cross the chasm of some of the glaring expectation gap. Organizations need to evaluate this as an integrated combination of both ‘process’ and ‘technology’ in a synergistic way instead of evaluating alone on just process or technology. If any one of the vital element is weak or ignored, it will fail to deliver the complete transformational savings.

Continue reading "How Source-to-Pay platform can help you achieve transformational savings?" »

Posted by Gurjeet at 10:09 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 08, 2009

Variablize your contract prices. Simplify your sourcing strategy.

The unprecedented changes in commodity prices, unpredictability and economic uncertainty over last one year has taught one important lesson to the sourcing professionals – ‘Variablize contract price by collaborating with supplier, especially for the repeat buy’ in order to keep purchase price competitive, realistic and in tandem with changes in the external environment. With commodity price index slowly rising up there’s also a strong prevalent feeling among sourcing professional about missing extremely good opportunity to achieve lower prices. However driving ‘low price’ opportunistically in such a way is a myopic approach, as the current environment lately has also taught us not to attempt low prices at the expense of suppliers thereby exposing them to financial risk hazard and threaten their own supply chain continuity.

Continue reading "Variablize your contract prices. Simplify your sourcing strategy." »

Posted by Gurjeet at 05:25 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 06, 2009

Cross-Functional decision making - A case of David Vs Goliath?

The unique bundling across technology and business processes (functional process definition as well as operations delivery) in Business Platforms entails cross functional decision making  between the CIO and the business owner ( typically COO’s or  functional owners such as CPO’s, HR directors, and Financial controllers).  There is also another cross-functional decision making between multiple business owners. For e.g, in the case of a Procure-to-Pay Platform, where procurement and AP owners have to align to take an integrated view; or end-to-end Hire-to-Retire, where individual HR function owners need to align. I will cover this in a separate blog entry, and will restrict this entry to discussing alignment between the CIO and business owner. 

In my interactions with customers, I have often encountered a dichotomy in alignment between CIO’s and business owners.  In most cases, while the business owners view this as a great model to help achieve their business objectives and want to take a technology agnostic view, CIO’s view this as a model that interferes with their organizational technology strategy and feel a loss of ownership and control.  This leads to organizations being unable to take a holistic business view, and lose out on a unique opportunity that could be a win-win for both the business owners as well as CIO’s.

Continue reading "Cross-Functional decision making - A case of David Vs Goliath?" »

Posted by Hariprasad at 03:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

July 01, 2009

Differentiating your Business Platform

Business platforms are bundled offerings across multiple layers – application, infrastructure & BPO layers. Will simple adding these layers one over the other bring substantial value to clients? Will such a offering have any sustainable competitive advantage for the service provider? Is there anything that stops another competitor to ape this model & deliver similar services? What should a service provider do to make its offering unique or to offer additional ‘perceived’ value to clients?

Continue reading "Differentiating your Business Platform" »

Posted by Yogesh at 11:38 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 24, 2009

Is there anything like an ideal market segment for Business Platforms?

For the current discussion, lets divide the overall market into three segments based on their revenue – Large (multi-billion USD corporations), Mid (1-10 billion USD) and Small (<1 billion USD).

 

 

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Posted by Yogesh at 12:10 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business Platforms: A Bundle of Benefits

As more and more clients seek to onboard  Business Platforms ( the new and innovative service delivery model ) and partake in the next generation of outsourcing BPO and IT together, I have been thinking through the core benefits these clients are seeking to get.

The bundle of benefits business platforms hold for clients are:

Continue reading "Business Platforms: A Bundle of Benefits" »

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 11:08 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

June 12, 2009

NASSCOM BPO STRATEGY SUMMIT 2009 Notes – Emergence of new age BPO

It was an eventful week and I did manage to catch a day at the NASSCOM BPO SUMMIT 2009. Three hours into the summit, I realized the changes in the world outside have also impacted the content and the focus of the Nasscom Summit. There were some interesting discussions on the inflection point, road to recovery, new rules of client engagement, employee innovation, technology enabled BPO delivery, global BPO, BPO in the domestic market and of course, efficiency, effectiveness and transformation. To me, what stood out was the universally acknowledged and all round  realization that traditional  pure BPO model is passé and the rules of the game have irrevocably changed. Every discussion brought to fore the need for innovation, higher domain competence and interestingly technology BPO integration. Every BPO company in the conference was looking at ways and means of countering the uncertainty and moving away from the pure cost arbitrage based BPO model. For me, it just reinforced the power and potential of  the new age BPO delivery model on which I have been working on for the last couple of years –  BUSINESS PLATFORMS ( Platform Based BPO)and how from being on the periphery  couple of years back when I started on the Business platform Journey , the new model has moved to centre table.

Overall, the summit acknowledged the new reality and was looking at new ways of creating new age BPO opportunities amidst adversity!

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 03:30 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 09, 2009

Business platform for next generation supply chain

Recall your last visit to nearby fast food restaurant where in spite of long queue you don’t have to wait for a long time. Thanks to the ‘order pick’ person, who suggests you to place order from a standard combination menu and helps finalize your order in no time. And you probably don’t even wait more than a minute at the cash counter. This is an excellent demonstration of ‘make-to-assemble’ strategy in collaboration with suppliers by fast food restaurants thereby realizing supply chain agility. Of course the standardization of product & process and underlying technology plays the most important role over here.

 

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Posted by Gurjeet at 08:01 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Pure play BPO is passé…....

Now that I am done with my meeting, which is where I left off and I have had some rest and am back to the Melbourne winter…yeah, I know winter in June, anyways….

In the late 90’s when Jack visualised … oops I mean Mr. Welsh visualized back office work being delivered from a low cost location…it was the “IN THING’.
Early 2000’s saw a number of “pure play” BPO companies emerge and all of them did well, re-invented themselves, added new offerings and pushed the lift and shift model until the word “stale and passé” have been put to shame.

Continue reading "Pure play BPO is passé…...." »

Posted by Asheesh Mehra at 05:19 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

June 03, 2009

We must look at GREEN solutions.......

…Its been a crazy last 10 days for me travelling from Melbourne to San Fran…then to Chicago, Montreal, Salt Lake City, LA, Sydney, Melbourne and write this sipping on a coffee on Orchard road in Singapore before I head into a meeting which is focused on why Business Platforms (BPO) is the next generation solution as against traditional BPO…
Is that a real question?

Continue reading "We must look at GREEN solutions......." »

Posted by Asheesh Mehra at 04:38 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

June 01, 2009

Business Platforms raining success

It was yet another rainy evening in Bangalore…………… When I was on my long commute home from office, there was a flash of lightening and it seemed like the clouds had opened up. The flash of lightening followed by the thunder, set me of thinking about the new world with its harsh realities of capital crunch and ofcourse the emerging cloud players who are opening up tremendous possibility to create a paradigm shift in the way value-added BPO and IT services will be delivered.

For a BPO company like ours with a strong IT parentage, this offers tremendous ability to bundle value services along with a value-added IP tool layer to the cloud to offer transaction-based services on tap to our customers. Business Platform Service providers will have a choice of cloud providers to chose from while focusing on the value added services layer  around the cloud.

The value layer (IP and Services) is like the proverbial silver lining in the clouds and can rain success for the clients who are willing to adopt this model and also for business platform BPO service providers

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 07:02 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 23, 2009

Business Platforms: A great opportunity for a complete makeover

Every day when I look at myself in the mirror, and as I add age and experience to myself, I do have an aspirational wish to have a complete makeover which can help me shed the small bags beneath my eyes, get rid of the double chin and fat around the waist-line……….While this remains an aspiration for me at the individual level, business platforms offers the unique opportunity for the clients to opt for a complete makeover.

Continue reading "Business Platforms: A great opportunity for a complete makeover" »

Posted by Anantha Radhakrishnan at 05:10 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 14, 2009

Platform Delivery- Changing Operating Models

The Operating model in platform based BPO is undergoing dramatic shifts from the traditional lift and shift BPO one and yet is a curious combination of the call center utilization driven one with the efficiency one in transaction processing outsourcing.

Continue reading "Platform Delivery- Changing Operating Models" »

Posted by Anirudh Dendukuri at 10:07 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

April 10, 2009

Business Platforms – Business and Technology confluence is a value multiplier

The current business cycle and liquidity crunch is forcing companies to bring a razor sharp focus on operational costs with capital reduction high on the CFO’s agenda. The traditional BPO model, where the process and people are managed by a BPO service provider where as the technology is still owned and managed by the customer has limited effectiveness, as the fundamental bottlenecks are not addressed. This has led to customer expectations of alternate delivery models that enable technology led transformation with minimal CAPEX.

Continue reading "Business Platforms – Business and Technology confluence is a value multiplier" »

Posted by Hariprasad at 07:37 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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