Tag Archives: Outsourcing

Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Delivery” Phase

Peter Smith - April 11, 2013 3:03 PM | Categories: Commentary

We’re now into recommendations around the execution of outsourcing projects, dividing the recommendations into three sections – strategy, implementation (last week), and today, ongoing delivery. See previous posts in this series here: Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 1) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 2) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 3) Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Strategy” Phase Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Implementation” Phase As we said last time, we can’t cover every aspect of outsourcing good practice here, and for many experienced procurement professionals, some of what follows may appear somewhat obvious. But we hope even readers [...]

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Understanding BPO and Technology Provider Relationships

Jason Busch - April 11, 2013 7:56 AM | Categories: Commentary

I recently had the chance to catch up with Everest Group’s Saurabh Gupta, author of the recent report Supply Chain Management (SCM) BPO – Beyond Procurement Outsourcing (PO) (subscription/purchase required). We were discussing procurement BPO and Everest Group’s research in the area, and I was curious to see whether Saurabh’s report has a list of technology partnerships that procurement BPO providers are leveraging in their go-to-market strategies. Here’s Saurabh’s list of some of the more prominent partnerships: Accenture leverages Ariba, SAP, Hubwoo, Coupa, MS Dynamics AX, and IQN for its S2P solution. IBM leverages ERPs including Ariba, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, [...]

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Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Implementation” Phase

Peter Smith - April 4, 2013 3:02 PM | Categories: Commentary

See previous posts in this series here: Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 1) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 2) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 3) Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Strategy” Phase We’re now into recommendations around the execution of outsourcing projects, dividing the recommendations into three sections – strategy (last week), implementation and ongoing delivery. As we said last time, we can’t cover every aspect of outsourcing good practice here, and for many experienced procurement professionals, some of what follows may appear somewhat obvious. But we hope even readers in that category will find something of value. Implementation [...]

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Beyond Procurement Outsourcing: Supply Chain and Direct Materials BPO (Part 2)

Jason Busch - April 4, 2013 8:01 AM | Categories: Procurement Research

The total number of FTEs dedicated to supply chain BPO relative to procurement BPO in the providers surveyed by Everest Group might surprise readers (hint: it’s lower for the former than for the latter, but not by much). As Everest Group gets into the relative scale of SCM BPO segments, the largest area of FTE focus is order management and fulfillment, followed by logistics and inventory management. Returns, MDM and RAC (reporting, supply chain analytics, and compliance support) have fewer FTEs dedicated to them in the provider community. One area of procurement BPO that overlaps with direct materials procurement is [...]

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Outsourcing – Key Recommendations for the “Strategy” Phase

Peter Smith - March 28, 2013 2:56 PM | Categories: Commentary

Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing how procurement functions can best position themselves to contribute to outsourcing initiatives within their organizations. See previous posts here: Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 1) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 2) Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 3) We will move on now to some recommendations around the execution of outsourcing projects, divided into three sections – strategy, implementation, and ongoing delivery. We can’t hope to cover every aspect of outsourcing good practice here, and for many experienced procurement professionals, some of what follows may appear somewhat obvious. But we hope even [...]

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The Role of HR and Communications in BPO

Guest Post - March 21, 2013 2:23 PM | Categories: Commentary

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Mark Woessner, a director at The Hackett Group. Your analysis of outsourcing is beginning to move forward, you’re beginning to draft an RFP, you’re assessing the population of providers to begin your focus and you have included your IT team in mapping out your systems and applications landscape. Have you included your HR and corporate communications team in this analysis? Are they aware of the scope? Including HR and communications early on in the process is imperative. This strategic initiative will touch HR issues as much as any technology or process transformation. The [...]

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Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 3)

Peter Smith - March 14, 2013 3:51 PM | Categories: Commentary

See Part 1 and Part 2 in this series as well. We have considered previously the role that procurement can play in outsourcing transactions and why it is sometimes difficult for the function to establish that role. One early contribution procurement can make is in the development or analysis of the business case for outsourcing. A typical case might be an organisation that thinks it may not get enough use out of outsourcing, so the board asks that a range of opportunities be considered, with some sort of review and proposal to be approved. (I’ve had involvement in such a case as both a [...]

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Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 2)

Peter Smith - March 7, 2013 4:01 PM | Categories: Commentary

In the first part of this series, we looked at why procurement people and functions are often not welcomed with open arms by stakeholders into outsourcing situations. Reasons can be around the importance of the outsourcing to those managers, or a desire to weight relationships more strongly in the supplier selection decision than procurement would perhaps advise. It can also come from a genuine desire to focus on the people issues around outsourcing – or less admirably, the line manager may have a vested interest if they too are likely to end up transferring to the service provider. We finished by [...]

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Procurement’s View of Outsourcing (Part 1)

Peter Smith - February 28, 2013 3:48 PM | Categories: Commentary

This is the first of a series around the topic of “outsourcing”. I’m coming from a procurement and procurement professional’s perspective of course, but I should stress that we are not looking purely at the outsourcing of procurement services. This is intended to be relevant for all outsourcing activities. I put “outsourcing” in quotes in that that first mention because the definition of outsourcing has caused problems over the years and indeed even real experts struggle to tie it down at times. For instance, if the organisation has never actually carried out a service internally, can we talk about outsourcing? [...]

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Automation: An Emerging Outsourcing Mega-Trend

Guest Post - January 23, 2013 12:01 PM | Categories: Industry News

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Thomas Young, a Partner with ISG, a research, consulting and advisory services firm. As the outsourcing industry approaches the quarter-century mark, a new wave of outsourcing is emerging. Businesses are increasingly deploying tools, platforms and software to automate tasks and functions. As a result, while traditional outsourcing derives cost efficiencies through labor arbitrage and by moving jobs to low-cost labor centers, today’s emerging model employs labor automation mainly in order to remove wages from the equation. The automation of functions and processes – which today is in early stages – will ultimately generate [...]

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How to Outsource: Stop Pointing Fingers and Resolve Problems Together

Guest Post - January 3, 2013 12:01 PM | Categories: Commentary

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Vantage Partners. Click for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of this series on managing performance in offshoring relationships. Practice joint contribution instead of blaming When performance issues arise in outsourcing relationships, the customer often defaults to blaming its provider, especially when the outsourcer is on the other side of the world. When your provider is a faceless voice on the phone, or just someone you exchange emails with, it is easy to forget they are people, with their own business needs and pressures. Pointing the finger at [...]

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How to Offshore: Relationship Management

Guest Post - December 20, 2012 1:12 PM | Categories: Commentary

Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Vantage Partners. Click for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this series on managing performance in offshoring relationships. Promote root cause diagnosis and collaborative issue resolution An effective way to promote exceptional performance is to distinguish penalties between problems that occur for the first time and recurring problems that have not been addressed at root cause. With an incentive for eradicating problems at their roots, providers may be more likely to communicate service issues and become more interested in generating solutions that prevent those problems from recurring. Rewarding exceptional [...]

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