KPMG BPO - Ukraine

Acquisition of Business Process Outsourcing Division from KPMG Ukraine

In September 2007, TMF acquired the business process outsourcing department from KPMG in Ukraine. The department consisting of staff and clients will be fully integrated in the TMF Ukraine business.

This acquisition forms part of the continued strategy to further strengthen TMF’s global presence.

TMF is a genuinely global management and accounting outsourcing firm, with over 2,000 professionals working from 77 offices in 60 countries around the world.To ensure that we can provide the highest quality worldwide, all our offices are company-owned.

A growing global network
TMF continues to grow. To build extra capacity, we are investing heavily in technology and infrastructure, and in the next few years, we expect to double the size of our network

A strong culture
TMF has a strong corporate culture and deeply rooted values. We have been careful to foster these as we have grown, and we will continue to do so as we expand in the future. TMF’s culture is founded on three key pillars: the right kind of people, excellent communication, and plain hard work.

Unique
It is this unique combination of a powerful, competitive network and strong corporate culture that sets TMF apart and enables us to provide our clients with the best possible value.

India’s Call-Center Jobs Go Begging

all centers are symbols of India’s economic boom. With Anglicized names and feigned Western accents, Indians handle credit card problems and troubleshoot computers, collect debts and conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Over the past decade or so, relatively high salaries in the call center sector have attracted thousands of applicants across the country. But now the boom is going bust because India’s college graduates and young job seekers just don’t want to be bothered with the business anymore.

Young people say it is no longer worthwhile going through sleepless nights serving customers halfway around the world. They have better job opportunities in other fields. The work is tiring and stressful and offers few career advancement opportunities, says Dr. A. Sankara Reddy, head of Sri Venkateswara College in New Delhi. In response to students’ complaints, Reddy said the college a few months ago banned call center recruiters from campus. At least a handful of other local colleges over the last few years have made the same decision.

The complaints come at a time when the Indian information technology sector, which includes companies that run call centers and do other outsourced work like medical transcription and claims processing, is facing a dearth of skilled labor. Many are opening back offices in other developing countries. India faces a potential shortage of 500,000 professional employees in the information technology sector by 2010, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade group.

Although the country produces hundreds of thousands of graduates each year, many lack the skills — in some cases, fluency in English — to be employed. The industry is also facing “intense competition” for workers from the retail and airline and hospitality sectors, where wages are now closer to what call centers pay, said Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM. As India expands its share of more sophisticated outsourcing like financial analysis and product research and development, Karnik said competition for choice employees is also growing. “As recently as four years back, the choice was pretty clear,” Karnik said. “Either you got a high-paying, good job at a call center or no job at all. Today, not only are there other options, but they are pretty close to the call centers [in terms of salaries].”

That’s a sentiment shared by many students at Sri Venkateswara College. On a recent Friday afternoon, a group of students chatted under the shade of a tree on the last day of classes before fall break Asked whether they would consider working at a call center, all eight said no, citing concerns about abusive customers and the long-term health effects of the jobs. “Earlier it was considered cool to work at a call center,” said Nishant Thakur, 19, after the group had dispersed. “That died out quite quickly.” Added Thakur’s friend, Vishal Lathwal, 19, “If you work at a call center today people will think you don’t have anything else to do or were a bad student.”

In addition to having to work at night, call center workers must sometimes cope with abusive and racist remarks from overseas customers upset with jobs being shifted to India. In an infamous example two years ago, a Philadelphia-based radio show host pretending to order hair beads from an Indian call center operator berated her as a “dirty rat eater.” While the abuse was for an on-air program, Indian call center workers say they’ve encountered similar sentiments from real customers. Within six months to a year, their dreams of making “lots of money” and buying motorcycles and other consumer goods fade, says Vinod Shetty, a labor lawyer in Mumbai and advocate for call center operators. “The burnout is very high.” The Indian government is concerned about stress-related conditions like high blood pressure at call centers and other outsourcing companies and is working on a health policy for the industry.

Still, industry experts say the jobs remain attractive for graduates of less prestigious schools that may not attract the job options of their elite peers. In an e-mail, Elango R, chief human resources officer for outsourcing firm MphasiS, which runs call centers, said the company has not had trouble recruiting workers and will hire 5,000 new graduates next year. Karnik said call center companies are experimenting with policies to reduce attrition. They are splitting the night shift between two workers and providing incentives like covering the cost of an MBA. But the lure of call centers may continue to diminish as India’s economy grows and creates more opportunities for young college graduates. When the phone rings years from now, the call center may be in another country entirely.

Analysts See Trouble Ahead for India’s Outsourcing Sector

Posted by Ann All on October 16, 2007 at 1:29 pm

Financial results for Indian outsourcing firms in the latest quarter are decidedly mixed, with the companies reporting financial gains but lowering future guidance in the face of continued problems with the rupee’s strength against the dollar, a softening U.S. market and difficulties finding enough employees.

The strong rupee, which has risen to nine-and-a-half-year highs, is the primary concern for companies like Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to a Reuters India report. While the firms are still posting respectable gains due to strong demand for their services, financial analysts fret that they won’t be able to sustain such growth.

Shares in Infosys and TCS declined during the quarter, while the broader Indian financial market posted a gain of 18 percent. CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets predicts a “… period of uncertainty and volatility — that may extend into 2008″ for the outsourcing sector.

Many analysts appear to think that TCS is meeting these challenges better than its rivals. TCS earns a nod from Merrill Lynch due to its plans to add 22,000 new staffers, vs. Infosys’ expected addition of 18,000 recruits, according to a story on indiaearnings.com.

The Associated Press reports that TCS boosted staff salaries by 12 percent to 15 percent in the quarter to curb attrition. Other strategies included charging clients higher rates and moving more work to low-cost sites. While U.S. clients had accounted for 60 percent of the company’s revenues in recent years, that number has fallen to 52 percent.

TCS is also working hard to diversify its services beyond its bread-and-butter application development and management business, reports InformationWeek, with consulting, business process outsourcing (BPO) and infrastructure services accounting for more than half of its revenues in the latest quarter.

The firm’s chief operating officer gave a shout-out to its infrastructure management business, which has seen strong growth in the three years TCS has offered such services. “Those deals used to be a half-million dollars; now we’re seeing deals of $200 (million) to 300 million,” he said.