BPOUkraine

Significant Outsourcing Agreement Augments BPOMS’ Strength in the Financial and Insurance Sector

December 4, 2008 on 5:38 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

ANAHEIM, Calif., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — BPO Management Services, Inc., “BPOMS” (OTC Bulletin Board: BPOM), a leading full-service business process outsourcing company focused on serving middle-market enterprises, today announced that it has recently signed a multi-year agreement to provide information technology outsourcing services to Forrest T. Jones & Company, Inc. (FTJ), an insurance agency and administrator. BPOMS will host and manage FTJ’s IT Infrastructure environment, including monitoring, support and maintenance of all related network components and devices from BPOMS full-service, 24/7/365 support center located in Pearl River, NY. BPOMS will also provide dedicated Disaster Recovery services from its high-availability recovery center in Branchburg, NJ.

“We are pleased to add FTJ, a well established middle-market company to our ITO client roster and believe this win validates the accelerating demand for our solutions and expertise during these challenging economic periods,” commented Patrick Dolan, Chief Executive Officer of BPO Management Services. “We were successful in winning this project because we proposed a customized ITO solution and demonstrated our flexibility in providing the critical infrastructure and core business processes required by this customer.”

Mr. Dolan further commented, “FTJ’s selection reflects BPOMS’ growing presence as a leader in the middle market, for those companies — particularly those in the Financial Services and Insurance industries — which require a world-class, North American-based high-performance infrastructure. BPOMS’ ITO services offerings focus on exceptional service level performance, while our operational efficiencies allow clients to achieve significantly lower cost and improved flexibility. The cost-sensitive economic environment makes these capabilities increasingly attractive for middle-market enterprises.”

About BPO Management Services, Inc.

BPO Management Services (BPOMS) is a business process outsourcing (BPO) service provider that offers a diversified range of on-demand services, including human resources, information technology, and enterprise content management solutions to support the back-office business functions of middle-market enterprises on an outsourced basis. BPOMS supports middle-market businesses new to the BPO market, established businesses that already outsource, and businesses seeking to maximize return-on-investment from their in-house workforce. For more information, please visit http://www.bpoms.com.

November 27, 2008 on 4:56 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

EDS, an HP company, and Guthy-Renker, one of the world’s largest direct response marketers, announced a four-year, $531 million contract extension and expansion to the companies’ 13-year relationship.

The new agreement for consumer direct business process outsourcing (BPO) services supports Guthy-Renker’s growing customer base in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other international territories.

Since 1995, EDS has provided Guthy-Renker with consumer direct services that span order and payment processing, warehouse and fulfillment, and call center/customer service to support its global operations and growth

Outsourcing as Survival vs. Luxury for American and European Companies

November 27, 2008 on 1:47 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

November 11, 2008

These days, all we are accustomed to see and hear is crisis. Crisis here and crisis there. One after the other, big financial and industrial institutions are either facing liquidity issues, credit problems or have already filed for bankruptcy in light of the deteriorating business environment, dwindling consumer spending, worrying unemployment rates and other dooming economic indicators.

Recently, companies as big as General Motors have been downgraded in their ability to finance in the years 2008 and 2009, which caused them to embark on the 5 billion cost saving program. Arrogance caused by strong market position and lush cash reserves are no more to be seen on the market. While inefficiencies can be tackled, many of the processes in General Motors have still to be done somehow, or, most probably, somewhere else in the world with the same quality expectations yet much lower budgets.

Outsourcing and cheaper stuff augmentation of supportive yet otherwise very expensive business processes like Finance, Legal, Customer Service, Intelligence, Internal Consulting for General Motors is not an option of revenue improvement technique for shareholders any more but a matter of survival. However, as GM and similar companies will see, Outsourcing and Staff Augmentation relationships are not a matter of a day’s decision but a tedious multi-month or even multi-year process of trust building and knowledge transfer.

Margin squeezing is not only bedazzling those rich and big, but also the small and medium, which are still depending on the general market conditions. Some countries, more than others, strongly depend on the SME performance. Switzerland’s employment landscape consists 85% of SME companies. Of course, Outsourcing of either IT or a business process is a much easier affair for an SME compared to industrial giants. Nevertheless, finding a secure and reliable partner is the first on the agenda for such companies.

Pushed by the revenue expectations, SMEs can also see Outsourcing as a back-door to survival but must strongly consider reliability, sustainability and privacy issues before even reviewing Outsourcing provider capacities. Where some companies with low-level processes can largely benefit from Indian and Vietnamese outsourcing providers with sky-high employee turn-over and attrition rates, companies which want to balance reliability of strong knowledge transfer and privacy with cost would benefit more from smaller outsourcing providers like BPO Ukraine or other small and reliable providers in locations like Romania, Bulgaria and Moldova. Specifically, this concerns such processes as IT, Finance, Legal, Project Management and where highly educated workforce is required together with stability of the knowledge transfer and strict control of privacy by the provider.

Outsourcing and knowledge transfer of a seemingly easy process such a billing might take up to 3 months and is very employee-sensitive especially when only 3 to 4 employees are engaged in outsourced activity. Alternatively, processes that require 25 to 30
outsourced employees in higher rank processes are even longer in knowledge transfer yet tend to be much less employee-sensitive.

Finally, choosing the right Outsourcing partner is very important based on specific company need. Rushed survival outsourcing decisions in bad economic times can not only disappoint the company but even further undermine its position on the market.

Author: Illya Reznikov / BPO Ukraine
ilya.reznikov@bpoukraine.info

Offshore Threat to IT Jobs: Overblown or on the Money?

November 24, 2008 on 9:19 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Is offshoring’s impact on U.S. IT jobs overblown?

While IT leaders surveyed by the Society for Information Management plan to spend more on outsourcing (both onshore and offshore) next year, it still accounts for just over 5 percent of projected 2009 budgets. The amount of money allocated for outsourcing peaked at 4.2 percent of budgets in 2006 and declined the past two years.

Offshore outsourcing will account for 5.6 percent of 2009 budgets, less than the 6.2 percent earmarked for domestic outsourcing and 33.7 percent of that will go to internal staff. What’s more, many companies are struggling to fill IT jobs. Or are they? Some experts contend that unrealistic expectations, rather than labor shortages, are the real reason companies may struggle to fill IT slots.

Nuggets from The 2008 European Outsourcing Summit®

November 24, 2008 on 8:46 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Jagdish R. Dalal, COP, Managing Director Thought Leadership, IAOP

1. Europe is warming up to the concepts of outsourcing and there is a lot of interest in learning about options and alternatives as more and more outsourcing strategies are discussed in the board and executive rooms of London, Madrid, Bonn, Rotterdam and Copenhagen. Accenture projects an 8 percent compounded rise in outsourcing activities in Europe. Access to talent, innovation and time to market are the key drivers.

2. Europe has enjoyed an 88 percent increase in revenue generated from business process outsourcing (BPO) activities and there is an increase in Asian companies (predominantly Indian) investing in European services companies.

3. United Kingdom, Scandinavian and Dutch companies prefer an outsourced delivery model, while Belgian and German companies prefer a captive model, according to an Offshoring Research Network (ORN) study.

4. With Asia’s proximity to Europe, China, India and Malaysia are interested in developing outsourcing collaborations,as are lesser known destinations such as Sri Lanka and Egypt.

5. Companies with an offshore strategy (nearly 75 percent of large corporations) intend to increase offshoring aggressively and are not scaling back expansion plans.

6. A comprehensive, cohesive strategy is a must for outsourcing and the requirement for such strategies — development and implementation will — further drive the outsourcing’s recognition as a profession.

These are but a few of the many interesting nuggets captured at The 2008 European Outsourcing Summit last month in Barcelona. The conference brought customers, practitioners, providers and academics together to look at outsourcing from the European point of view while maintaining a global perspective. In one of many interesting presentations, David Barrett, chief executive of PROCURiTAS, indicated the public services industry’s (PSI) growing use of outsourcing in European countries; especially in the U.K. and Nordic countries. He also predicted that BPO activities by PSI will surpass the IT outsourcing market and will fuel the growth of outsourcing in Europe.

Bill Metz of Proctor & Gamble (P&G) noted how shared services and outsourcing co-exist rather than compete. This is an interesting topic in the European marketplace because of the generally higher acceptance of the shared services model over the outsourcing model. He shared how P&G created business value by first creating a shared services organization and then using outsourcing to further leverage its impact on the corporation. As he said, “shared services aggregate the demand and outsourcing puts it in the hands of suppliers.”

Rob Hodgkinson of Orange Business Systems described the key strategies and implementation success factors for providing IT outsourcing to telecomm customers: work jointly with the customer to adapt a solution for addressing evolving customer needs along the complete lifecycle of the engagement, and use IP transformation as the basis for success.

Tim Palmer of PA Consulting provided an industry perspective to what providers must do to ensure success when delivering on their promise to the customers. His five-point observations, based on a survey, indicated that providers must increase realism in business case and solutions, transparency, standardization and collaboration in order to generate a higher level of customer loyalty and affiliation.

In another presentation, Vodafone and Eriksson discussed the lessons learned from the partnership between providers and customers, stressing that it is a symbiotic relationship where key performance indicators (KPI) are used to manage the relationship for success rather than as a basis for penalties. This perspective was shared by several participants, who acknowledged that the most successful outsourcing relationship is based on trust and mutual success. Danny Ertel of Vantage Partners discussed this perspective further in a presentation that outlined the characteristics of a successful relationship. His description of strong governance began with a well-defined relationship ranging from strategic to transactional, and how two parties can utilize the concepts for a successful, managed outcome from outsourcing.

Lastly, the University of Navarra setting provided ample opportunities for delegates to interact and learn from each other. Social events also enhanced networking and I am sure that the contacts established at the Summit will lead to longer-term relationships among various participants.

Significant Outsourcing Agreement Augments BPOMS’ Strength in the Financial and Insurance Sector

Outsourcing as Survival vs. Luxury for American and European Companies

Offshore Threat to IT Jobs: Overblown or on the Money?

Nuggets from The 2008 European Outsourcing Summit®

CEO Twitter

Why BPO in Ukraine?

Recent Jobs