Archive for the Trends Category
Posted on August 12, 2010 by Atul
In a statement on its website, the ministry said the policy covers firms specializing in information technology outsourcing ITO, business process outsourcing BPO and knowledge process outsourcing KPO in 21 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Dalian and Shenzhen.China is currently the worlds second-largest outsourcing market for such services, after India
via China gives tax break to service outsourcing firms.
Posted on July 16, 2010 by Atul
Tata Consultancy Services: Investors.
Yesterday, TCS announced a strong performance in the first quarter of the fiscal year. Is the market really improving dramatically or is this the pre-summer bump?
Revenues at $1,794 million
up 6.4% sequentially; up
21.2% Y-o-Y
Financial Highlights for Quarter Ended June 30, 2010:
- Operating Profits at $487 million; Growth 32.5% Y-o-Y and 5.1% Q-o-Q
- Profit After Tax at $403 million; Growth of 29.3% Y-o-Y and (4.9) % Q-o-Q
- Earnings Per Share at $0.21
Business Highlights for Quarter Ended June 30, 2010:
- Gross Addition of 10,849 Employees (Net Addition of 3,271 employees)
- 36 New Clients added
Please use the link below to view the entire press release.
http://www.tcs.com/news_events/press_releases/Pages/Q1-2011-Revenues-USD-1794-million-up-6.4-percent-sequentially-up-21.2-Y-o-Y.aspx <http://www.tcs.com/news_events/press_releases/Pages/Q1-2011-Revenues-USD-1794-million-up-6.4-percent-sequentially-up-21.2-Y-o-Y.aspx>
Posted on July 5, 2010 by Atul
Danville Express : McNerney introduces bill to fight outsourcing.
Here we go again! Another politician working on making America less competitive and forcing American companies to have more disadvantages as they compete globally.
Jobs are not created by putting more hurdles in front of companies. Jobs are created by providing incentives for companies to invest in communities and new opportunities.
Has anyone done a study of how many jobs are being created by foreign outsourcing companies in the U.S.A.? Has anyone done a study to see what impact outsourcing is having on the fortunes of the buyers? Are they competing better and thus creating more jobs and better futures for their employees?
We are lot more connected than when most of these politicians started their careers. They need to spend more time understanding the connectedness of our world and how one needs to compete NOW!
Posted on June 5, 2010 by Atul
Global Services -Voice-based BPO Industry is Reviving.
Voice-based services or call center services– the offering that actually started it all for the BPO industry in countries like India and the Philippines, has changed a lot since inception. The very purpose of outsourcing this service has undergone a radical change.
“Initially, clients preferred to turn the work to service providers because the service providers offered a cost advantage or some type of ‘peak volume overflow’ capacity that the clients could not staff themselves,” says Sid Pai, Partner & Managing Director, TPI India.
Offshore call centers offering voice-based services were the perfect answer to this and one saw a massive build up of call centers in the early part of the decade. Very soon, the industry matured. Many call centers reached a point where they couldn’t scale up or they couldn’t retain key clients. This led to a shake-up in the call center industry, especially in India, where many of them were snapped up by IT services companies ( e.g. Infosys-Progeon, Wipro-Spectramind, IBM-Daksh, etc) seeking to enter the BPO industry.
BPO’s addressing the voice market had growth challenges. The way out was to shift the focus to other areas of BPO like finance/ accounting, mortgage, insurance and other niche sectors like KPO and LPO. Says Atul Vashishtha, CEO of Neo Advisory, “The market for non-voice services was expected to grow faster, as the call center sector was more mature and significantly developed .”
Revival and New Hope
The voice-based BPO industry is reviving. “Investments in technology platforms, process improvements, equipment and facilities and acquiring specific vertical capabilities, made by the service providers are outpacing those by the client. Service providers are moving up the value chain,” says Pai.
Voice- based services continue to expand their domain and tailor their offerings according to the needs of their clients. “Today customers are looking at unified communications to integrate various communication systems with their business applications to improve their business processes. These improved business processes lead to higher productivity for employees and greater customer satisfaction which in turn results in higher revenues and profits,” says Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Unified Communications, Cisco India & SAARC.
Expanding scope of services
Clients today have access to a wide spectrum of services under voice. “Cisco subscribes to a range of services covering the entire gamut from technology services desk for customers and employees, human resources support for employees , escalation options for customers for quick access and marketing access to and from Cisco,” says V.C. Gopalratnam, Vice President (IT) and Chief Information Officer, Globalisation, Cisco, on the internal deployment of voice services in the company.
Providers are also developing expertise in niche areas within voice services. Andrew Kokes, Vice President of The Americas, Sitel, cites an example. “Revenue generation is one of the key metrics that Sitel is measured against for most customer care programs (revenue per month, revenue per call), and is a large part of our core expertise. More than half of all Sitel-managed inbound programs incorporate some form of upsell or cross-sell offer.”
The maturity of this segment allows outsourcing to many more locations as compared to emerging areas of BPO and thus finding price points and capabilities according to the specific needs of the client. “In all cases the services (we subscribe to) have a “follow the sun model” with sufficient geographical spread to cover all time zones effectively,” says Gopalratnam.
Collaboration and integration- the new formulas of growth
Collaboration and integration of communication platforms and capabilities are the new formulas of growth in this sector. “Collaboration is slowly moving towards new forms such as Enterprise Social Software, UC as a Service, TelePresence etc. Cisco’s Unified Contact Center solution…. provides a VoIP contact center solution that enables organizations to integrate inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet applications, including real-time chat, Web collaboration, and email. This integration provides for unified capabilities, helping a single agent support multiple interactions simultaneously, regardless of the communications channel the customer has chosen,” elaborates Zia.
Voice services are set to move to a higher degree of integration at multiple levels. Kokes says, “Voice-based contact center services are rapidly moving beyond traditional “voice” communication to include a blend of voice and live-chat (i.e., text based) engagement. In such arrangements, contact center agents are provided with real-time indicators of a website visitor’s propensity to purchase, and can invite that online consumer to chat via IM before the customer navigates away from the site. Such a model also opens the door to Pay-for-Performance client arrangements, whereby the call center fees for service can be aligned with the program’s overall success in producing incremental online sales.”
Zia also sees integration and improved technology as growth drivers for this sector. He says, “Enterprises will move beyond contact center to a customer interaction network with hosted contact centers for both enterprise customers and service providers. In a central office or data center, service providers will host the contact center infrastructure software, which will be shared by multiple business customers. Subscribing business customers will have IP or time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructures or a combination of the two.”
A suite of integrated services can also be introduced, he says, like virtual call centers, network routing with computer telephony integration (CTI), networked interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing (routing calls between contact centers based on call context information, agent availability, and customer information from databases) and multimedia applications such as Web collaboration and e-mail response management.
With so much innovation happening and set to happen in this ‘traditional’ sector of BPO, analysts are optimistic of its transformational capabilities for businesses. “(Its potential to transform) looks evident given the investments made by the service providers on technology and platforms. In addition, leading service providers have built modern global services delivery infrastructures and implemented best practices that allow them to effectively and efficiently leverage their scale, volume, global capacity and technology to better serve their clients.” says Pai. To this, Atul Vashishtha adds that this is a market that will become increasingly global and Tier 2 players will need to specialize to succeed.
Posted on May 24, 2010 by Atul
Why Chief Information Officers Are Second-Class Citizens Among Top Executives – WSJ.com.
I have been working with CIOs since 1991 and have come to admire many of them. CIOs at Applied Materials, Ron Kifer and Jay Kerley; CIO at Family Dollar, Joshua Jewett; CIOs at P&G, Fedex and others are not just senior leaders, they are helping transform their firms. They are leading key initiatives.
While the articles has good pointers for CIOs on how to better evolve their future careers, wish they had talked to one of the above to show how many are already doing it!
Posted on April 30, 2010 by Atul
Global Services -Outsourcing Firms in the Gulf Boot Up.
Traditionally outsourcing companies have provided service for back-office operations. But countries such as the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco have been making efforts to build up infrastructure, people and funds to grow the sector. And industry experts believe the outsourcing industry has been growing at 20 per cent annually in the Middle East.
Amin Khaireldin, Strategy Advisor and Board Member at Egypt-based Information Technology Industry Development Agency (Itida)Information Technology Industry Development Agency, said: “In Egypt we put resources in a business park-like Smart Village. From the premises services such as financial analytics are conducted by 200 analysts for a Dubai-based company. Technical as well as packaged implementation services (PIS) are the focus.”
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is another area gaining relevance in the region. BPO involves the contracting of operations and responsibilities of specific business functions (or processes) to a third-party service provider. “Gulf-based companies are now considering taking BPO services from outsourcing firms in the Gulf. And Itida has been making investments towards acquiring international standards in this segment,” said Khaireldin.
IT service companies such as Patni Computer Services (PCS) have noticed this change in this region. Derek Kemp, President (Emea), PCS, said: “The Gulf economies have been building resources for a three-tier model. This is mainly onshore, nearshore and offshore. They are trying to inject the culture for IT services. However, not all countries in the GCC are human intensive as the scale is not available. But the growth potential is immense, for instance, a country like Egypt has been able to grow in its GDP because of outsourcing. The opportunities from oil, gas, telecom and financial services are immense.”
According to Kemp, long-term contracts in outsourcing have started happening, which was not the case earlier. “Traditionally the market in the Gulf depended on buying rather than a service model. Therefore, now even companies based in the Gulf are looking at working on an outsourced model. This attitude change will raise the profile of the region.”
He also explained that although the market size is small the ICT (Information and computing technology) spend in the region would help other sectors grow. “The ICT spend in the region is the same as in the UK. Markets are flat in the UK currently and US is starting to pick up while continental Europe has picked up in offshoring.”
Khaireldin said the UAE is not human intensive, but it provides high-end financial services. “For low- and mid-level services human capital is essential along with low labour costs and incentives.”
Gulf states are looking at upgrading skills of graduates in the BPO and PIS segments. “PIS is expected to hit $3 billion (Dh11bn) by 2020 from the current $200 million in the region,” Khaireldin said.
Source: zawya.com
Posted on April 8, 2010 by Atul
The “A” word attrition is back | Outsource Portfolio.
The “A” word (attrition) is back in outsourcing companies
With uncertainty easing, attrition, the biggest nightmare for HR managers in IT services and outsourcing companies, is on the horizon while for some firms, it is already here. So just how are the big 3 IT services firms faring on the attrition and hiring front? Consider the following attrition rates (as of January):
- Infosys. Attrition at Infosys rose from 10.9% the last quarter to 11.6%. However, a March Wall Street Journal article quoted a CLSA Asia-Pacific report as saying that there are unconfirmed rumors that 4,000-4,200 employees have resigned at Infosys for the month of February alone – well beyond the 1,200 employees who should be resigning each month (as of December 31, Infosys had about 109,882 employees). Nevertheless, it was also noted that Infosys had the largest bench strength in the industry at almost 20,000 free resources.
- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Attrition at TCS has been stable at around 11.5% – although company officials expect this rate to rise. However, the Wall Street Journal noted in February that TCS will go on a hiring spree and hire up to 30,000 new employees after the next fiscal year begins on April 1. This is on top of the 11,500 planned hires for the first quarter of 2010. It was also noted that 70% of new hires for the new fiscal year will be fresh graduates and more than 2,000 employees will be recruited from outside India.
- Wipro. Wipro had an attrition rate of about 13.4% – up from an average of 8.9% over the past three quarters. Hence, the Hindu Business Line noted that they were planning a salary hike for February along with promotions to help prevent attrition from rising further while recruitment initiatives would happen on a demand basis and include a mix of campus hires and science graduates along with experienced talent. Meanwhile, the Hindu Business Line quoted Girish Paranjpe, the Joint-CEO of Wipro’s IT Services group, as saying that the company’s bench strength was around 7,500 to 8,000 on an employee base of about 103,000 while the industry bench strength standard is usually twice that.
However, another Hindu Business Line article noted that the brunt of any rise in attrition rates will likely be borne by mid-size software outsourcers who could see attrition rates reach the 15% level. Moreover and since the big players have mostly not been hiring for some time, employees with midsize firms are more likely to consider jumping to larger companies if they are offered the right opportunity.
Meanwhile, utilization rates (that is, the number of employees billed per hundred verses those who are on the bench) are also increasing at the big 3 IT services firms. According to the Hindu Business Line, utilization rates rose from 67.3% to 68.8% at Infosys, 73.6% to 77.2% at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and 70.8% to 73.2% at Wipro.
Nevertheless, as both utilization and attrition rates rise, its time for companies to once again think about long-term strategies for retaining employees. As Raman Roy, the chairman and managing director of BPO firm Quattro, noted in the Financial Express, meddling with salary and benefits is a short-term strategy (he chooses to focus on in-house training to create an efficient group of high achievers) while attrition is merely a symptom and not a disease. In other words, its the symptom of an increasingly healthier job market and economy for outsourcing.
Posted on April 2, 2010 by Atul
Is Supply Chain Mangement Emerging from the Clouds? – Feature Article – World Trade. By Mary Shacklett
By 2012, research firm IDC estimates that $7.7 billion will be spent worldwide on cloud services, but the lion’s share of it will go to ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) cloud services providers, not to supply chain management. Supply chain cloud solutions lag the marketplace, but there are signs now that initial enterprise trepidation about outsourcing supply chains is starting to fade.
“There are two aspects to the benefits of cloud computing models for manufacturing and logistics organizations,” says John Brand, Research Director at Hydrasight, an IT research and analysis firm. “One is to remove the internal costs associated with running your own IT infrastructure. The second is the benefit of increased visibility across organizational boundaries, particularly if a third party is involved. A decade ago, we were talking about electronic marketplaces as the future of supply chain systems (e.g., for catalogues, ordering and trading). Now, the reality is that organizations are often better served by data intermediaries who aggregate and value-add to the data that passes through the supply chain. Most often this data is anonymized or heavily obscured to ensure privacy and integrity, while giving organizations greater insight and intelligence into data, which can be reasonably shared between parties, with the right security policies and protocols in place. These ‘data hubs’ can provide very rich services beyond simple data aggregation, reporting, and analytics. In fact, when you consider what cloud-based email services can do for the control and removal of spam and viruses, cloud-based supply systems can similarly reduce the ‘noise’ within the supply chain to simplify and speed up data exchange.”
The follow-up question is, can these cloud-based supply chain management solutions address the most pressing issues that manufacturing and logistics companies are facing today?
Strategies for managing the supply chain
The recent recession saw many companies outsourcing manufacturing. This resulted in supply chains that became complexes of thousands of different suppliers around the world. With manufacturing taking place in China, Korea, and other overseas locales, supply chains began to flow not only through manufacturers and suppliers, but through customs brokers and freight forwarders as well. Simply put, more could now go wrong—given the systems and processes that track manufacturing and delivery to ensure that orders are filled “just in time” with quality goods in a period when you don’t want to overstock.
“Traditionally, there have been three paths to supply chain management and inspection,” explains Josh Green, CEO of Panjiva. “The first was not to worry about it, and to simply judge the suppliers by the results. This resulted in occasional high risks, but also in lowest prices, and was a bit of an ‘ostrich’ approach. The second approach was to have an army of people at the facilities checking every move, which is what many of the larger companies chose to do. This was a good way to keep tabs on processes and quality, but was very expensive. The third method was to outsource the process by working with a local inspection firm, which essentially was an ‘army for hire.’ The middlemen would assure that the necessary steps and procedures for manufacturing were being followed.”
Green says that if you step back and look at all three approaches, the underlying issue is really an information collaboration process. Like Hydrasight’s John Brand, Green believes that critical information can be analyzed by using cloud-based supply chains to see if cost efficiencies are being realized—instead of having to deploy local inspectors for suppliers. “Let’s take the example of shipping data,” says Green. “If you look at each of your suppliers and see what is going on with their customer relations, or if there have been sudden drops in shipments, it might be that something is going on. While this kind of data is never really a substitute for actually visiting a supplier, it can be a useful indicator.”
Cloud-based supply chain management is not going to sweep everyone in overnight, but there are some fast-moving industries moving toward adoption, like high-tech manufacturing, which operates in an extremely competitive and volatile market. In these cases, managers want as much supply chain visibility as they can get for purposes of risk management, especially after the recent economic downturn, which created more outsourcing to where fewer companies are doing their own manufacturing anymore. Cloud-based supply chain solutions give these organizations the ability to quickly scale and compete as the global economy bounces back—as well as a means to automate many standard processes while managing the exceptions more effectively.
Here are some of the current supply chain “brush fires” that companies are fighting:
Support of community collaboration. With the growth of manufacturing outsourcing, companies now have thousands of suppliers that are difficult to qualify and onboard to their internal management systems for purposes of supply chain communications and collaboration. Sometimes, Excel spreadsheets are the only immediate collaboration tools available, which leaves much of the day-to-day collaboration story untold.
Re-projecting forecast. Changes to production forecasts practically occur overnight now—especially as we are emerging from a recession where nobody knew for sure what consumers would continue to buy as they tightened their belts. Managing these fluctuating forecasts impacts everyone, because no one wants to be caught short of goods or long on inventory. This means that forecast revisions have to be shared in real-time or in near real-time with stakeholders throughout the supply chain. This is impossible to do unless you have tightly integrated systems, beginning with CRM and Demand Management and extending to ERP and supply chain management.
Workflow visibility without boundaries. Somehow, companies and their suppliers need real-time visibility and workflow automation for purchasing and inventory management, as well as for automation of order fulfillment and logistics execution. They can no longer wait for computer “batch processes” to run overnight and generate reports that they read in the morning.
What the cloud provides
There is widespread agreement that the single, most pressing issue for companies today with supply chain responsibilities is to get their arms around their burgeoning supplier networks. This is an area particularly well matched to current cloud provider strengths.
“A typical cloud supply chain solution already has all of the infrastructure in place,” says Mark Woodward, CEO of supply chain solutions provider E2open. “In our case, we have 50,000 suppliers and trading partners already in our network, so when a client comes to us, we are able to connect them to a rich community of partners almost instantaneously. This not only means that our customers are up and running more quickly, it also means they are significantly cutting down on onboarding and associated costs for both themselves and their partners.” Other supply chain cloud solution providers have similar supplier repositories, which means that company processes for supplier qualification and setup for supply chain communications and collaboration are dramatically reduced in both time and expense.
Perhaps the most pivotal question for companies seeking the cloud, however, is the degree of integration they and their systems require with their supplier bases. There are two fundamental cloud computing approaches to be considered: either a Web portal that provides real-time communications and collaboration capability between companies and their suppliers, or a fully integrated business-to-business (B2B) solution that not only provides real-time communications and collaborations between all parties, but that also performs transaction processing and data base updates in real-time.
For example, if you use a cloud-based supply chain solution as a kind of Web portal that allows you to readily exchange information and to collaborate with your supplier bases on day-to-day issues, all you might need is deployment (which the vendor provides, coordinating with your IT department), training and optimization—again provided by the vendor, who presents best usage practices. “Our goal is to build tools so simple that training isn’t really required,” says Panjiva’s Green. “For example, you don’t talk about needing to get trained in order to use Google. The key is building tools that are flexible enough to bend to how people are doing the business, and not the other way around. Complication has been a major reason why technologies have failed in the past.”
On the other hand, there are also organizations with heavy B2B integration needs for their supply chains. Building integration on this level takes time, whether you are approaching the project internally or with a cloud-based supply chain provider.
“Enterprises with large supplier communities require a robust B2B integration platform that accounts for the wide variety of operating environments and technical sophistication of their suppliers,” says Peter Scott, Vice President of Supply Chain Solutions for Exostar, which provides cloud-based supply chain services. “Implementing and maintaining such a platform, however, can be a cost and resource challenge….Over time, this is why we are seeing more companies opt for this integrated, business-to-business cloud-based framework.”
John Brand of Hydrasight says he has witnessed a range of supply chain deployment styles and timeframes, depending on the solution deployed, the expectations from business users, and the depth of integration required by clients. Brand’s research shows that for discrete applications like portalized supply chain management, organizations can be up and running in weeks, if not days. But for more complex, large scale and highly integrated projects, this timeline can grow from several months to years.
“The biggest obstacles are usually inflated expectations for business users, obstructionary IT departments, and poor alignment in IT infrastructure,” said Brand. “Getting the balance right between the level of investment required to onboard into cloud-based services and the execution of a migration and management plan is still a significant challenge.”
Cloud-based supply chains and enterprise IT
How equipped are enterprise IT departments to work with cloud-based supply chain management?
There are industry experts who view IT as a “sticking point” for cloud services in general, and for cloud-based supply chain management in particular—but there are reasons.
First, nearly all cloud-based services are introduced into companies by end business groups, but it is ultimately IT that is charged with the risk management for the business relationships; the setup, monitoring and execution of SLAs (service level agreements) with the cloud services providers to ensure that corporate business interests are met; and the responsibility of meeting security and compliance standards that are demanded by outside auditors and regulatory agencies. It is understandable that IT becomes naturally nervous when faced with the prospect of outsourcing operations, and losing control for what it remains responsible for. “There is always an impact when you bring in a new system,” says e2open’s Mark Woodward. “People have processes that they want to keep. The challenge is to be flexible enough to support those processes, while providing them with the ability to scale effectively.”
In some cases, enterprises opt to keep those processes. They do this by running their supply chain management systems internally, and by chartering IT with the task of testing new suppliers and maintaining both the supplier data base and the system. “These companies put up their own supply chain portals for vendors and business partners and use their IT departments to implement the portals and support them,” explains Exostar’s Scott.
Scott says that there are advantages in skills and expertise that cloud-based providers can offer IT. “Let’s say IT can create a portal,” says Scott. “Now, how do you get 500 to 5,000 business partners to connect? A cloud-based supply chain solution brings instant connectivity to a common body of suppliers and partners, which is why you find many cloud-based providers coalescing around certain industry groups like aerospace, finance, or retail. When we talk to a new customer that wants supply chain collaboration, we’ll already have 50 to 75 percent of the suppliers the customer uses enabled on our network. This takes the risks, costs, and time to implement way down so that it’s not just adding technology anymore.”
A second aspect to any portal is support—an area for which supply chain cloud providers have professionally trained call centers and subject matter experts on staff. With a supply chain cloud services partner, IT can leverage this knowledge when suppliers come calling with questions, since the customer service demands of outside customers are considerably greater than the demands IT technicians typically experience while dealing with business users within the enterprise.
“Overall, we see the market starting to change,” notes Woodward. “More and more, CIOs and their teams are beginning to think about cloud-based supply chain management as a competitive requirement. It’s simply no longer possible to run a globally integrated supply chain with traditional ERP and internal systems alone, and leading companies are starting to realize that.”
The next steps
Although companies have not moved as aggressively into cloud-based supply chain management as they have into other cloud solutions, they are nonetheless moving forward because cloud-based supply chain solutions can improve their competitive advantage. In particular, supply chain in the cloud is being adopted in industries like financial services, retail, high technology, groceries, and pharmaceuticals—with enterprises in North America and Europe making aggressive entries into cloud and spreading adoption into Asia as a result, since 75 percent of the supplier connections are there.
As this shift occurs, emphasis is turning to SLAs for cloud-based vendors that address enterprise concerns, like 99.5 percent minimum uptime, pre-scheduled times for system maintenance and installations of new software releases, warranties on data protection and security, and in some cases, caged servers in data centers that are only used for a specific enterprise client, with admission to those cages granted only to cloud provider technicians who have been authorized to work on those servers by the enterprise client.
Understanding that the key to the cloud is a large base of qualified suppliers, cloud supply chain management providers have also made it easy for suppliers to join their networks. It doesn’t cost 70 to 80 percent of suppliers anything to be implemented today on a cloud-based supply system. Those who actively engage in collaboration might see a fee of $2,000 per year, and those who are active B2B partners might see a $10,000 annual cost, but relatively speaking, it is inexpensive for suppliers to take part in cloud-based supply chains. wt
Mary Shacklett is founder and president of Transworld Data based in Olympia, Washington.
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Posted on March 27, 2010 by Atul
This trend to establish operations in key locations is important or else offshore outsourcing firms cannot effectively serve global clients or compete effectively against the original global players.
Genpact Expands its Presence in Romania | Business Wire.
Five years after entering Romania, Genpact establishes additional center in Cluj-Napoca to accommodate its growing presence in Eastern Europe
BUCHAREST, Romania–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Genpact Limited (NYSE: G), a leader in managing business processes, today announced it would expand its presence in Romania by acquiring a new facility in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca.
“We are extremely excited to continue investing and expanding in Romania, which has proven to be a fantastic source of talent for our business and our clients for over 5 years of presence here”
Genpact, which has over 38,600 employees worldwide and a global presence in 13 countries, entered Romania in 2005 with its operations center in the country’s capital, Bucharest. In 2007, Genpact established a center in Cluj-Napoca as part of its strategy to invest in Tier II cities. Encouraged by the availability of local talent, infrastructure, and cost-effective operations, Genpact is now building additional capacity in Cluj-Napoca – one of its most dynamic locations in Europe. The new Cluj-Napoca facility is expected to be operational by July 2010.
“We are extremely excited to continue investing and expanding in Romania, which has proven to be a fantastic source of talent for our business and our clients for over 5 years of presence here,” said Patrick Cogny, CEO, Genpact Europe.
“Over the last two and a half years, the service delivery centre in Cluj-Napoca has expanded its capability to cover the entire spectrum of Finance and Accounting services – including Procure to Pay and Order to Cash, Record to Report – Order Management and Customer Services. The expansion positions Genpact well for growth in scope and scale for existing and new clients in Europe looking to make their business processes more effective,” said Ramneesh Mohan, Genpact’s Site Leader for Cluj, Romania.
“The employees Genpact will hire in Cluj-Napoca this year will include economics graduates, accountants, and language professionals – for jobs ranging from accounts payable and order management to customer collections, and high-end accounting and controllership,” said Iulia Nare, Genpact’s HR Manager for Cluj, Romania.
Currently, Genpact provides Finance & Accounting, Procurement, IT Helpdesk, and Customer Support services from Romania to more than 20 clients from Western Europe and the United States. This year, the company expects to create several hundred new jobs in Romania, being one of the most active local employers in 2010.
About Genpact
Genpact is a leader in managing business processes, offering a broad portfolio of enterprise and industry-specific services. The company manages over 3,000 processes for more than 400 clients worldwide. Putting process in the forefront, Genpact couples its deep process knowledge and insights with focused IT capabilities, targeted analytics and pragmatic reengineering to deliver comprehensive solutions for clients. Lean and Six Sigma are an integral part of Genpact’s culture and Genpact views the management of business processes as a science. Genpact has developed Smart Enterprise Processes (SEPSM), a groundbreaking, rigorously scientific methodology for managing business processes, which focuses on optimizing process effectiveness in addition to efficiency to deliver superior business outcomes. Services are seamlessly delivered from a global network of centers to meet a client’s business objectives, cultural and language needs and cost reduction goals. Learn more atwww.genpact.com.
Posted on December 10, 2009 by Atul
By Atul
Vashistha, Chairman, Neo Advisory & Neo Group
Sharing this to solicit feedback and comments and then I plan to update this again in a week.
1.
Demand Outlook Starts Weak but Expected to Rise by
Late 2010
a.
Budgets will continue to be tight.
b.
Discretionary spend will be minimal, with approvals
requiring rigorous ROI explanations. “The majority of investments will need positive ROI within
fiscal year and as a result lead times and planning cycles will be short”, said Applied Materials Deputy CIO, Jay
Kerley.
c.
Most budgets will be approved on rolling month or
quarter basis
d.
Most companies SG&A budgets will be flat or down
e.
Systems integration led by standardization and
migration to common global processes will lead growth. Simplify is the new buzzword.
f.
Expect to see greater recovery from the financial
services, healthcare and hi-tech sector
g.
Applied Materials Jay Kerley, adds that “Cloud
computing offerings and Software as a Service offerings will make sizeable market
share gains putting pressure on traditional service offerings”. We are
definitely seeing SaaS make deep inroads while Cloud is often a buzz offering
from many.
2.
M&A continue but yield little benefits
a.
Small tuck in acquisitions focused on domain knowledge
continue
b.
New entrants such as Dell and Xerox impact on the
market will be too early to judge
c.
Gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 continues to widen.
Cognizant solidly a Tier 1 player.
d.
Some niche Tier 2 players will continue to prosper but
focus is key to success
3.
Pricing expected to be down or flat in spite of many
upward pressures
a.
Expect pricing pressure to continue
b.
Pricing will be flat to slightly down compared to 2009
pricing
c.
Weak exchange rate and weakness of US dollar will put
increased pressure on suppliers
d.
Increasing trend to move away from staff augmentation/T&M towards
output-based pricing, managed services, etc
4.
Hiring & Utilization will strengthen
a.
Expect to see growth in new graduate hiring in
emerging locations but will be mute as suppliers focus on managing bench
b.
Better firms operate with utilization in the high 70s
c.
Utilization trends downwards as more new hiring ensues
5.
Wages will rise creating increased pressure on margins
a.
Inflation is rising and so expect wages to rise 8-10%
in India and many other Asia Pacific locations, while USA and Western Europe
will see much smaller raises
6.
Risk Management important to continued growth of
industry
a.
Greater attention to geographic portfolio
b.
Great attention to monitoring of risk and compliance
related to supplier base
7.
Rising Geographies take market share away from
traditional locations but pie growing
a.
New destinations continue to take a share of an
expanding pie
b.
China losing some steam while Central and South
America surging
c.
Buyers will increasingly utilize existing supplier's Global Delivery
Models to provide time zone coverage and realize true 24×7x365 support
d.
Offshore players will continue to expand and/or setup operations in new
geographies
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