Nari Kannan's Blog (14)

With the Indian BPO on the rise recently, many companies have turned their attention to building up centers in Rural India.



This is a welcome development. With the cities already bursting at the seams, the last thing you need are more people migrating there from the villages in search of jobs. Rural Outsourcing has the potential to stop this by keeping trained or trainable people in smaller Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns in their new BPO centers.



It brings much needed economic… Continue

I was sitting through a presentation from a KPO doing some very interesting things in the areas of Market Research and Intellectual Property Research. In the process of executing these services, this company has come up with very useful online, web-based tools that make the creation and dissemination of such research easier and painless. Very useful technology indeed!



However, the CEO got the very appropriate feedback that when they mix their KPO service offerings with offering the… Continue

Indian BPO companies are betting big on a new way of providing BPO and other services.



Infosys is planning a number of cloud computing offerings. They had developed the techhnology for some of their clients and they are making them multi-tenant and pay-as-you-go kind of pricing.



TCS has… Continue

The Chinese BPO dragon is just waiting in the wings! It appears that in the last five years, Chinese BPO efforts have been gaining ground and poses some real threats to the India BPO industry. It doesn't mean that all customers are going to switching to China tomorrow, but they are chipping away at those areas that make sense for companies to outsource to China rather than India!



China in… Continue

In IT Enabled Services, the secret to offshore success is often onshore!



In practice, many business processes are documented in great detail only when it is offshored. Often, the offshore vendor will help in getting this done and it is in their interest to do it in as much detail as possible.



This may be enough for drawing up a contract with a few key KPIs and SLAs and as long as these are measured diligently and analyzed, processes are executed as expected, no more, no… Continue

The Internet, Web and inexpensive telecommunications technoology has, and is changing the way work gets done. Distance no longer is a constraint! Scanned documents can be viewed across the globe and manual work done anywhere.

This ed to the BPO revolution that overtook the world about a decade or so ago, and the world is never going back to the way it was before!

However, it appears that even if business processes are not outsourced, Shared Services centers can…

Continue

Many of the top BPO players in India had added a BPO arm mostly through acquisitions. Infosys bought Progeon, Wipro bought Spectramind and so on.



Recently, we have seen weaknesses in the IT Services business of many of the Indian service providers but the BPO side of their business powers on. In fact, you may say that many of the public companies are lucky that the weaknesses on the IT Services side are offset by gains in the BPO business.



"Moving Up the Value Chain" is… Continue

When BPO contracts specify stringent SLAs on performance when they outsource to a low wage country, the vendor is in the cat bird seat to begin with.



Where you need 100 people to man the phones in a call center, you put 200 people to work. After all, the margins are pretty good and every SLA can be at 99.999% compliance. This is where the trouble starts. Once the process is on its way and people gain experience, salaries start escalating. You find people absconding without notice,… Continue

When we talk about price competition to BPO companies in India coming from China, Vietnam and Cother countries, it is not always an either/or, black and white situation.



BPO processes vary significantly in skills needed. Some are subject to price competition severely and many are not.



The BPO business is a very fluid business. In India, the BPO business keeps changing all the time. What you see is the net gain after all the increases are adjusted for all the decreases.… Continue

There is a distinct trend in the Indian BPO scene when many global corporates exit out of their own captives preferring to sell them to Third-Party providers.



This transition usually comes as shocks to all concerned - the global corporate, the employees of the center and the third-party provider. Many classy BPO providers have extensive experience handling these these transitions with ease but still these are some of the typical problems encountered:



a. Cost… Continue

Many BPOs, when faced with the argument of not competing on price, turn to show their Per Transaction Pricing as the way they have "transformed" BPO for their clients.



This will eventually end up biting the Service Provider! Here's why:



Indian BPO Service Providers have traditionally thrown people at the problem rather than any considered, clever ways of doing things better or cutting waste in a process.



This worked before the advent of Domestic BPO or the… Continue

In talking to many BPOs, whether they are Captive or Third-Party, one thing that always comes up is that many BPO buyers write a lot of SLAs in to contracts but the BPO provider is not in a position to provide accurate performance reports on these SLAs because the Buyer will not arrange to give them raw data with which to produce these reports.



Many times, BPO service providers, improvise, collect performance data manually, and produce reports that may or may not reflect reality.… Continue

Many times, BPO service providers throw away a golden opportunity during transitioning business processes from customers.



They take a bad process, transition it well and execute it well, with all the waste inside the process still intact!



This is called by C.K.Prahlad, the management guru from Michigan, "paving the cowpath". Cows meander through a meadow in a convoluted meandering pattern, people start walking back and forth and pretty soon it becomes a foot path. If you… Continue

We hear the words "Business Transformation", "Moving Up the Value Chain", etc in IT/ITES circles, especially in India.



Are those just marketing spin messages or the latest buzzwords that need to be mindlessly repeated, just because the other guy is using them in their pitches and literature?



Business Transformation and Moving Up The Value Chain will prove to be true saviors in the IT/ITES space when competition based on price creeps up from other countries like Vietnam and… Continue