Much of the current buzz in the industry continues to be centered on RPA, a term currently largely synonymous with automation, and this technology clearly has lots of life left in it, for a few years at least. Outside service providers, where its adoption is rapidly becoming mature, RPA is still at the early growth stage in the wider market: while a number of financial services firms have already [...]

NelsonHall has recently attended both the WNS analyst session in New York and Infosys Confluence in San Francisco. It may seem trite to suggest that their chosen locations reflect the differing approaches to the market being taken by the two firms, but there are some parallels. Sector domain focus While Infosys is taking a horizontal approach to taking emerging technologies to the next level[...]

The utilities sector is an important one for HCL. The company has worked with ~100 utilities and currently has 25 active utilities clients, with its utilities revenue primarily from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. To focus further on this sector, HCL has enhanced its capability to offer end-to-end and BPaaS-based services through a number of partnerships and is now going to market targeting[...]

In my previous blog on automation in BPO, I argued that, despite all the hype, the current implementation of robotics process automation (RPA) is little more than a labor arbitrage play, enabling the business to run with increased efficiency using existing technology and offshoring frameworks. So where does automation in BPO go from here? RPA is essentially execution of repeatable, rule-based t[...]

There is currently a huge amount of hype around use of automation in BPO, and many commentators seem to forget that the early BPO contracts were often driven by organizations with inadequate/creaking legacy IT systems using BPO as an enabler to combine replacement of legacy systems with an operations and process improvement layer. These early transformations were also frequently seen by both cl[...]

In this, the third and final blog in this series on BPO automation, I take a look at where the BPO market currently stands and where it’s going next. Well, the use of workflow and platforms to surround and supplement the client’s core systems has been well-established for a period of years. BPO has worked relatively well in these environments. The vendors largely have process models[...]

NelsonHall recently attended the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) “Empowering the Customer to Win in the Digital Age” event hosted by HPE BPS. The theme was strongly around digital and empowering organizations to own the (increasingly digital) interface between customers, suppliers, and employees. In support of this theme HPE is investing heavily in automation, both in its own platform[...]

HCL began its robotics program in late 2013. Since then HCL has invested ~$1.5m in robotics, (ToscanaBot Automation Framework), via its HCL ToscanaBot center of excellence, which currently employs a team of ~25 personnel and is planned to grow to 50+ personnel by 2016. HCL estimates that its robotics practice currently has an FTE impact of around 2,000 with this expected to grow to ~8,000 FTE impa[...]

In 2012 Genpact was starting to get behind the curve. Many of its competitors had caught up with the need for process framework methodologies and it was struggling to combine its IT assets with its business process services business. In addition, despite its focus on process excellence, Genpact sometimes lacked depth of domain expertise with the result that its execution was variable across accoun[...]

While organizations across retail, consumer goods and, in particular high-tech, continue to face cost pressure, their attention is increasingly moving to addressing their competitive positioning and innovation in product development, particularly to meet the needs of developing economies. Indeed there is strong pressure to enter new territories in both the high-tech and CPG sectors. Noneth[...]

NelsonHall’s Business Process Services (BPS) Confidence Index is a quarterly index of confidence to monitor changes in industry confidence in the global business process services market. The objectives of the quarterly “BPS Confidence Index” are to identify: Whether the demand for business process services has strengthened or softened in the past quarter Expectations o[...]

BPO contract TCV in Q1 2015 continued the improvement in contract activity seen in Q4 2014, with BPO TCV picking up and gaining momentum over the past two quarters following relatively low levels of BPO TCV awarded in Q2 and Q3 2014. In particular, Q4 2014 showed a 6% improvement in BPO TCV year-on-year, with BPO accounting for 31% of total outsourcing TCV. Q1 2015 BPO TCV performance then impr[...]

Analysis of NelsonHall’s U.K. outsourcing contracts for 2014 shows that outsourcing is becoming more sophisticated in a number of key areas across both service delivery and contracting. Within service delivery: The role of Cloud was increasingly evident with for example the first HR BPO contracts based on Workday software emerging in BPO and IaaS contracts in support of SMEs becoming c[...]

This is the final in a series of short blogs that look at various disruptive forces and their impact on BPO. The impact of all these disruptive factors is that BPO is now changing into something that the client has always wanted namely “High Velocity BPO”. In its early days, BPO was a linear and lengthy process with knowledge transfer followed by labor arbitrage, followed by process[...]

In our discussion, we’ve missed out lots of fashionable disruptors like mobile and cloud and these are indeed important elements within BPO. However, let’s be more futuristic still and consider the impact of the Internet of Things. Some examples of current deployment of the Internet of Things are as follows  Sector  Examples [...]

BPO has always depended on partnerships with third-party software providers to provide supplementary platforms around client core systems to provide specialist functionality in areas like procurement, collections, & reconciliation handling. However, there is a danger that this can lead to a Heath Robinson (or Rube Goldberg) combination of applications, involving expensive software or SaaS[...]

There has always been a big divide between those suppliers that are comfortable handling voice and those suppliers that were comfortable handling data with very few comfortable with both. However, the impact of digital is such that it increases the need for voice and data convergence. A common misconception in customer service is that the number of transactions is going down. It isn’t, it[...]

There’s another disruptive force in BPO that no-one likes to talk about. It’s called labor arbitrage. Everyone is keeping a bit quiet about this one. It’s nothing like as sexy as robotics, or analytics, or SMAC, but it’s also a disruptive force. One side of labor arbitrage within labor arbitrage is relatively defensive, but in spite of automation and robotics, mature &ld[...]

Robotics has moved incredibly fast over the past year, but so has analytics. Analytics has been around in support of process improvement initiatives & Lean Six sigma projects for many years. It has also been present in areas like fraud analytics, which means at a personal level that you now have to re-instate your credit card most weeks. However, analytics is now becoming much more pervasiv[...]

This blog is the first of seven in a series looking at six disruptive forces and their implications for BPO. Some of these are widely talked about, others less so. This first blog sets the scene and looks at the impact of robotics. Subsequent blogs will consider the implications of: Analytics  becoming all-pervasive and increasingly predictive Labor arbitrage is dead – long live l[...]