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Rachael Stormonth, Senior Vice President at BPS analyst house NelsonHall, discusses the latest business trends in F&A BPS with Professional Outsourcing magazine, and describes how some companies are using it as a platform for business transformation.
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[...]
Infosys has been awarded a five-year renewal through June 2019 of its F&A BPO contract with Philips. There is no significant change in contract scope or direction in the renewal, largely a recognition that Philips and Infosys are part way through a major program of change in the way that Philips carries out its finance and accounting operations, including a major change in Philips[...]
There are clear positives to this quarter’s results from Infosys, and its share price certainly picked up (is now the highest since March 2012), though it continues to look to address a number of challenges, some of which are company-specific issues. This is the third quarter of improved topline growth. Management has raised revenue guidance for full FY 2014 to growth of 11.5-12% (up from[...]
Xerox Services has not operated its business at high efficiency over the past few years. It has been very late to offshoring, growing revenues internationally, and rationalizing its services businesses around a few key areas. The current five plank strategy is devised to address those challenges. Xerox understands the challenge of successfully offshoring (and near shoring) its workforce to lower c[...]
Accenture has announced that in 2012 it was awarded a five-year application services contract by Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) to streamline Zurich’s global finance IT. Services being provided by Accenture Finance and Risk Services include development, implementation and management of SAP-based finance and BI applications that support Zurich operations in North America, Germany, Switzerlan[...]
Cognizant is to acquire TriZetto, a healthcare ISV in the U.S., for $2.7bn in cash. TriZetto has a headcount of 3.7k (Cognizant at end of H1 2014: 187k.4). In its last 12 months, TriZetto had $711m in revenues and a non-GAAP operating margin of 18.4% (Cognizant in 2013: 20.6%). TriZetto LTM revenues breakdown by service/product line is: Payer software: 40% (~$277m) Consulting: 23% (~[...]
Cognizant recently announced a F&A BPO contract award by facility management services group ISS, covering its operations in the Nordics. This is the third F&A BPO client win for Cognizant in the Nordics. The first award was with Volvo, announced March 2011, followed by one at Norway Post, in partnership with local partner Visma, in July 2011. Cognizant’s clie[...]
Capita acquired Cedar HR back in September 2011 for £15m to bring new market opportunities to the group. At the time there was much talk of police turning to technology and outsourcing for efficiency but a period of indecision preceded and followed the first-ever election of police and crime commissioners in November 2012. Against this backdrop, the Cedar seed has slowly geminated and starte[...]
Wipro results this quarter show an ongoing improvement: topline growth is continues to improve and operating margin is the highest it has been for two years. Clearly, it still has a way to go to catch up with Indian growth rates (NASSCOM guided on 14% this FY), let alone with TCS. This quarter, Wipro achieved an operating margin of 23% and $101m in y/y topline growth; TCS achieved an operating mar[...]
Another very strong quarter from TCS, with no hint of the slight slowdown in growth that we have seen at Accenture (for its November quarter) and Infosys. If we look at where the growth is coming from: The more established ADM services (where Infosys took its eye of the ball in FY 13) contributed an estimated $173m in additional revenue, or 35.4% of the y/y growth of $490m. (Infosys achie[...]
NelsonHall recently visited the Capgemini BPO center in Campinas, Brazil, about 100 kilometers to the northwest of the city of São Paulo. Capgemini’s Campinas center is part of a network of BPO centers in Latin America, the others being in Guatemala City; Santiago, Chile; and, most recently, Blumenau, also in Brazil. We had had the privilege several years before to visit the Guatemala[...]
HP recently provided an update on its turnaround program at a securities analyst meeting in the U.S. One major takeaway from the briefing is that HP ES, in particular, is taking additional steps to rebuild and strengthen its business. Looking firstly at the HP group-wide picture, turnaround measures till now have included restructuring, retooling, and reducing costs. Successes so fa[...]
An encouraging quarter for Infosys after the disappointment of missing guidance last quarter. It is not possible to determine the precise level of organic growth (excluding Lodestone) as Infosys is folding some of its consulting capabilities into Lodestone Consulting: this has happened already in the U.K. and is occurring now in the U.S. and Germany; the incremental $20m in revenue contributed [...]
Xerox's acquisition of U.K. based Customer Value Group (CVG) indicates that Xerox's ambitions for the acquired ACS business and for FAO in particular have not dimmed. CVG's primary product, Value+ is a SaaS-based offering that supports the management of customer credit, collections, and disputes and Value+ will now form a cornerstone of Xerox's O[...]
Accenture has continued the trend of acquiring captives as a means of gaining domain capability in a multi-process F&A BPO deal with Marriott International, Inc. that has been described by both parties as a strategic collaboration. In a ten-year contract to provide F&A services to Marriott and its franchisees in the Americas, Marriott will transition its Louisville, Tennesse[...]
Accenture's seven-year BPO contract with Swedish steel manufacturer SSAB announced this week will see it providing accounts payable, accounts receivable, some CMS activities as well as operational procurement, sourcing and category management for selected country operations in Europe. Accenture has had a long history of providing FAO services to manufacturing companies in the Scandinav[...]
