Multiply your supplier collaboration effort using Platform
Continue reading "Multiply your supplier collaboration effort using Platform" »
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.
February 15, 2010
January 06, 2010
Unified technology is vital for managing Supply Risk effectively
Continue reading "Unified technology is vital for managing Supply Risk effectively" »
December 16, 2009
Should You Build, Buy, Host, Rent or Managed while addressing your underlying technology?
November 19, 2009
‘Cloud services’ delivered through Platform Model
While there are many different ways these cloud services can be delivered, the two main conduits are ‘Public cloud’ and ‘Private cloud’. Public cloud typically is the service which is available to everyone with a standard offering and you pay a fee based on computing power usage while Private cloud on the other hand is available to specific organization only on a platform model. For eg. not anyone can plug into to spend analytics service provider say at Infosys cloud and can buy the spend report based cloud services from Infosys. However the real test of cloud services provider would be their ability to evolve this platform model on a multi-tenant architecture. Shared infrastructure thus would not only bring economy of scale but would also be a good breeding ground in driving innovation due to its ability to get a real time access of customer behavior, business need and cross pollination of best practices within the private cloud and let organization drive non-core business processes managed through the cloud services using platform model.
October 30, 2009
Business Platforms are nothing but Managed Services on the Cloud !!
Continue reading "Business Platforms are nothing but Managed Services on the Cloud !!" »
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.
October 19, 2009
eAuction is just one aspect of eSourcing strategy
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.
September 14, 2009
Pay-as-you-Use Pricing Model - for Managed Services
Platform service model is trying to emulate exactly that only by making its services available in much cost effective way for SMB segment – who often grapple with unpredicted demand and so cash flows. It allows companies to adapt to the changing external environment which could be either rapid growth or reduction in a smooth way. There are different ways evolving to define or meter the ‘service usage’ – for eg ‘$ spend’ in case of Source-to-Pay or ‘# Employee’ in case of HRO and all this make the pricing model evolution extremely challenging for managed services vendor from two aspect: One – Acceptance of pricing model plus price points by mass companies; two – Challenge for managed services provide to ensure a stable revenue. While it’s still a challenge for managed services providers to customize its services for ‘mass adoption’ and evolve an ideal ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, early drift indicates the future trend and the necessary need to come up with an innovative pricing model in this fiercely competitive services arena.
September 07, 2009
Ensure Green Purchasing thru Green Technology
Green purchasing has shown excellent resilience during current tough economic time and delivered value through sustainable cost savings thereby breaking the myth that – It’s a social obligation and so you have to necessarily pay an extra premium. There are three most important aspects to be considered while detailing out policy for green purchasing – social obligation, environmental impact & economic benefit. Of these the latter – which is directly related to the cost equation needs to be broadened for life cycle costing approach , so the cost equation not only need to capture cost for energy, waste and duration but also additionally include cost for repair & maintenance, disposable effort, health & safety compliance thereby offsetting any potential financial and environmental risks to the organization in today’s increased regulatory world.
We have noticed that most of the organizations assessment of carbon footprint is mostly limited to ‘organic buying’, ‘local buying’, ‘eco friendly or 'energy star certification’ and reason for this is that there’s no universal criterion which can be applied to every situation. Buyers need to define green policy for each spend category keeping following broad criteria in mind:
- Look for energy efficiency
- Avoid hazardous, toxic foot print in the product or services
- Conservation for heat, light, water and other natural resources
- Look for refurbishment and recyclability
- Easy disposability like bio-gradable
- Leverage technology automation
This brings us back to the most debated aspect – How compliant your purchasing processes are?
Unless organization leverage technology to embed green policy into its purchasing processes- like green specification & standards, green selection criteria, life cycle costing approach, green clauses in contracts at an enterprise level, it is difficult to comply with green purchasing commitment. It is extremely important for organization to leverage the green technology – eSourcing, eProcurement and eAccount Payable (which avoid paper heavy manual processes – saving tones of paper) thereby making its purchasing processes not only more effective & efficient but would also ensure complying with green purchasing policies at an enterprise level.
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.
July 29, 2009
How Source-to-Pay platform can help you achieve transformational savings?
Continue reading "How Source-to-Pay platform can help you achieve transformational savings?" »
June 30, 2009
Leverage your suppliers to drive innovation
Continue reading "Leverage your suppliers to drive innovation" »
June 22, 2009
Voice of Customer Analytics - a managed service offering for telcos to help combat recession
In the wake of the global economic crisis, firms across industries and geographies have come under tremendous pressure to reduce costs. Most have responded by adopting a 'Capex Freeze' and 'Opex Reduction' mentality, which has been evident in their spending decisions, including those involving their outsourcing partners. Communication Service Providers (CSP) has been no exception!
Against this backdrop, Analytics as a BPO service offering assumes significance, considering its potential to deliver quick and tangible Return On Investment (ROI) against relatively minor investments on the part of CSPs.
June 18, 2009
What exactly should a Platform service provider really ‘own’? – Part II
Infrastructure layer has three broad components – the actual hardware on which the application/s will be set up, the connectivity (with the client data centre & the process execution (BPO) delivery location/s), and the hosting services (data centers).
Continue reading "What exactly should a Platform service provider really ‘own’? – Part II" »
June 03, 2009
We must look at GREEN solutions.......
Is that a real question?
May 26, 2009
Big Bang with the BOX
In my recent interaction with a global client CFO of a large publishing company, he made a very insightful observation, as to how keeping things simple in this increasingly complex world can be value-adding. When I pressed him further, he went on to say, “how I wish I can have a service on tap which brings along business process, people and technology together with accountability for business results”.
At that instance, I realized that the CFO was looking for a magic pill ala process-in-a-box solution for his needs. Business Platforms brings to life not only horizontal processes like Procure to Pay but also vertical specific industry processes as well.
BPO players like us have started out a new business-line of making boxes, for example: newspaper-in-a-box , bank-in-a-box (for more details on vertical industry boxes -watch this space) to provide an out of the box solution bringing together the various pieces of vertical industry process, people domain expertise and technology together.
Business Platforms is the box to success for clients and BPO providers like us.
May 14, 2009
BPO mantra for success: Tech-savvy BPO
When the BPO industry came into existence more than a decade ago, the industry growth was enabled by Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Today, the IT layer has moved past enablement to deliver differentiated services to customers that enhance business value facilitated by business process excellence + lean (six-sigma) based process improvements multiplied by the power of IT, thus helping business value multiplication for customers by an order of Magnitude.
In the new Information Technology Differentiated Services (ITDS) BPO world, you will see two layers of new services:
May 07, 2009
Business Platform Benefits: Part 2
I was posed with a question in one of the discussions, which I am raising again in this post. What should be the primary metric of evaluation for business benefit realization, for an enterprise which is on-boarding on the platform?
While I organize my thoughts let me put some numbers around the definition of the enterprise for more clarity in my thoughts as well the question, let a small size enterprise be less than USD 1bn in revenue, mid size ranging from USD1 to 10bn in revenue and large size be more than USD 10bn in revenue.
April 24, 2009
Business Platform Benefits : Part 1
Business platforms should ideally be viewed as a logical extension of Customer’s enterprise. Although the unique delivery methodology would have customer’s business processes to be executed outside of its enterprise boundaries. This delivery methodology also ensures shift from a capex to a opex based operating model. There is also increased management focus on strategic initiatives, as transaction management of the business process is now being executed on business platform and the responsibility of processes, application management and hardware provisioning has been transferred.
Poll
Recent Posts
- Multiply your supplier collaboration effort using Platform
- Unified technology is vital for managing Supply Risk effectively
- Should You Build, Buy, Host, Rent or Managed while addressing your underlying technology?
- ‘Cloud services’ delivered through Platform Model
- Business Platforms are nothing but Managed Services on the Cloud !!
Categories
- Business Transformation
- HRO Platform
- Order Management Platform
- Process Excellence
- Source to Pay Platform
- Technology