Industry news

NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) has announced the acquisition of McKesson Shared Services for an undisclosed sum.

NHS SBS is a 50/50 joint venture between the Department of Health and French service provider Sopra Steria. McKesson Shared Services is the outsourced HR, Payroll and Pensions arm of McKesson UK.

The NHS claims that this acquisition will enable NHS SBS to extend its employment services to support the NHS centrally.

David Morris, NHS SBS managing director said: “This strategic acquisition complements our existing service provision particularly as MSS mirrors our own approach of working closely in partnership with clients to help them achieve greater efficiency rather than the function being merely a commodity transaction.

“In the face of immense budgetary pressures and tight resources, it is vital that NHS back office functions such as recovering overpayments, processing the monthly payroll run or processing expenses payments are carried out smoothly and accurately.

“We have already proven our capabilities in this respect and now with this acquisition we can broaden the support we provide across the NHS that can ultimately free-up more funds and resource for frontline care.”

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Related: NHS, Serco and Teleperformance among NOA Professional Awards Winners

HMRC has issued a £20 million tender for consultants to advise it on how to shift away from its Aspire outsourcing arrangement with Capgemini and Fujitsu, which is due to come to an end in 2017.

The government department plans to contract its future IT work out to over 400 smaller IT service providers, with no single supplier receiving a contract worth more than £100 million.

The news was revealed as the tender went out in a recent issue of the Financial Times.

Claims have been made that HMRC’s current approach towards IT has “stifled innovation and flexibility”; it is hoped that this new approach will help HMRC gain more of its own expertise, as many suspect that the department is currently solely reliant on the knowledge of its service providers.

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Related: Government Clamps Down on NHS Procurement, Consultant and Agency Spending

Recently Sourcingfocus noted that Egypt is revitalising its aim to contend as a top destination for outsourcing. Now Daily News Egypt has reported that “a spate of new agreements with a number of large investors” has given Egypt’s ITO potential a further boost.

Multinational companies such as IBM, HSBC, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Teleperformance and many more have signed agreements to extend their partnerships with the Egyptian government’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA).

“Egypt can become a multilingual hub in the region for BPO. This is what many international companies are looking for, but the industry has not been fully exploiting this opportunity,” said Giorgio Modesti, CEO of Teleperformance Egypt.

Nevertheless, a report by Everest Group has confirmed that Egypt’s offshore global services industry is growing at 7.5% annually as a result of the country’s renewed political stability.

Further reports on Egypt’s outsourcing potential can be found via “Offshore Outsourcing: Egypt is back On”, a blog post on the National Outsourcing Association’s website.

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Related: Egypt Revitalises Aim to Contend as Top Outsourcing Destination

Accenture has signed a multi-million dollar contract with Etihad Airways, confirming that Accenture will support the airline with the implementation of its business transformation programme to improve efficiency, productivity and growth.

Accenture will also provide strategy and management consulting services in departments such as HR, finance, and procurement and supply management. The company will be working alongside Etihad’s staff and its existing airline technology partner SAP.

Etihad’s Chief Information and Technology Officer, Robert Webb, commented: “To sustain Etihad Airways’ current and future growth, we need to achieve operational and organisational efficiency by creating an integrated approach to business processes, underpinned by a scalable, common technology platform.

“We believe that working with world-class business transformation and technology companies like Accenture and SAP will help us realise this goal and prepare our business for years to come with an increased focus on the guest.”

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Related: Accenture Reveals Where High Performers and Typical Performers in BPO Differ

G4S’s annual general meeting on Thursday 4th June 2015 descended into chaos after a number of protestors disrupted proceedings and had to be forcibly carried out of the venue by guards.

On the day of the meeting it was announced that all electronic devices would be banned from the venue; despite this, parts of the protest were successfully filmed by one activist.

On the YouTube page where the video was uploaded, those behind the demonstration claim that they were “protesting against [G4S’s] profit from oppression, state violence and human rights abuses everywhere… From G4S-run prisons in Israel where Palestinians are tortured and held without charge, to the killing of Jimmy Mubenga during his deportation from the UK by G4S security.”

A G4S spokesman recently told IBTimes: "The G4S board has already announced that the company does not intend to renew these contracts [in Israel] as they expire over the next two years."

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Related: G4S to Confiscate Shareholder Mobile Phones at Annual General Meeting

Executives at Wipro have announced that the company will be introducing average wage hikes of seven per cent, keeping it in line with rival Indian service providers Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.

Wipro also said in April that it would reward top performers with double-digit salary hikes.

Earlier this year, TCS increased the wages of its employees by an average of eight per cent, while Infosys introduced salary increases of six-and-a-half per cent.

“The average salary hike would be seven per cent for offshore employees and two per cent for onsite employees, respectively, with high performers being rewarded with substantially higher increases in their compensation," said Saurabh Govil, Global Head of Human Resources at Wipro.

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Related: Wipro, Infosys and TCS See Europe as an “Achilles Heel”

European datacentre Telecity has agreed to be bought by US datacentre giant Equinix for £2.3 billion, rejecting its planned merger with Interxion which was agreed back in April in the process.

After German regulators had given the green light, it was expected that Telecity and Interxion Holding would be going in for an all-share merger, creating a new company with a combined value of over £3 billion.

There is now speculation that Interxion itself is a potential acquisition target. Digital Realty Trust and CoreSite Realty Corp have both been tipped as potential buyers for the Amsterdam-based firm.

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Related: Telecity - Interxion Merger Gets the Green Light

Accenture and Everest Group Research have released their report “High Performance BPO: the Value Multiplier Effect.”

According to the report, one in five of the companies surveyed have found the secret to extracting the highest number of benefits from their outsourcing engagements. The report reveals the “secrets of BPO high performers” by comparing where high performers and typical performers differ in their priorities.

Here are the key findings:

• 69 per cent of high performers said gaining access to technology in a BPO relationship was important; only 27 per cent of typical performers agreed

• 78 per cent of high performers stated that their BPO relationships enabled the augmentation of their talent pool, compared to 19 per cent of typical performers

• 76 per cent of higher performers saw “access to industry and process expertise” as an important priority; this was just 38 per cent for the typical performers

Learn more from this Accenture slideshare presentation.

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Related: Outsourcing Budgets Overspent on Reducing IT Costs, Research Finds

G4S has announced that it will be confiscating the mobile phones of shareholders and media representatives at its annual general meeting on Thursday 4th June 2015. Even G4S staff and board directors will not be permitted to bring smartphones into the vicinity.

The security and outsourcing company is attempting to prevent a repeat of last year’s meeting, where activists who had bought G4S shares in order to attend staged a protest against the firm’s activities and filmed the entire process.

The Guardian has reported it is likely that protesters from a group known as Stop G4S will be attending this year’s AGM.

A spokesman from G4S commented: “Last year we had a large number of protesters who were effectively staging demonstrations in the meeting and they were filming it.

“The intention is not to suppress the legitimate free speech of people but it is just simply to maintain some degree of security for our people in the meeting. That is the rationale.”

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Related: G4S Chief Accepts 73% Pay Rise

Capita has successfully bought Isys Group, the specialist developer of powerful workforce and workplace management systems, responsible for the development of the “Intelligent Identify” ID verification software.

Isys has over 500 customer internationally in sectors including banking, facility management and online gaming, all of which Capita will now have access to.

Sean Massey, managing director of Capita’s secure software and technology business, said: “Isys Group has developed its best-of-breed applications over 15 years.

“The acquisition is a great strategic fit with Capita’s existing markets and portfolio of solutions and services. It will enhance our capabilities and create new opportunities to deliver services to our clients, such as automatically feeding information about employee attendance and hours directly into their payroll systems.”

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Related: Capita Acquires IT Solutions Provider Pervasive