Industry news

According to a study conducted by real estate consultant Cushman & Wakefield, Vietnam is currently the best outsourcing location on the planet, when costs, risks and operating conditions are all taken into account.

The study, ‘Where in the World? Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) & Shared Service Location Index’, ranks the top 36 countries for offshoring in terms of foreign direct investment into the BPO sector and is conducted every year. Vietnam achieved fifth place in 2014; in 2013, it did not even make the list. Now the Southeast Asian country dominates, followed by the Philippines, Bulgaria and Romania.

The study cites the Vietnamese Government’s ability to provide a stable business environment as a key contributor to the nation’s BPO success. In terms of actual market size, India remains the world’s largest BPO destination.

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Read this next: Jamaica Strives to Become a BPO Contender

Business technology and services provider Xchanging plc has announced that it has achieved exceptional results with MM4, a year after acquiring the eSourcing business.

In 2014, the company saw revenue growth of 60 per cent, the addition of 40 new customers and expansion into new markets such as Australia, Russia and Latin America.

Chirag Shah, Executive Director at Xchanging Procurement, said: ‘I am thrilled to be able to report on the success of MM4 in the first full year since the acquisition by Xchanging. Our procurement teams and services are now fully integrated, which is driving major benefits to our customers and responding to their evolving business needs.’

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Read this next: Xchanging Shares Take a Hit after £45.8m Profit Decline

Liverpool-based Document Direct has received a £400,000 investment from the North West Fund for Venture Capital.

The company, which specialises in outsourced dictation, is among the UK’s leading suppliers of transcription and secretarial services, producing upwards of 20,000 documents per month from recordings sent over the internet. It will utilise the funding to pursue its expansionary aims.

Martyn Best, founder and managing director of the firm, commented on the windfall, saying "The growth of Document Direct until now has been funded by myself and some very supportive shareholders, and the addition of this investment will enable our service infrastructure to be enhanced, and our business development and client service team to be significantly strengthened.”

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Less than half of the employees who work for buyers of BPO believe that they have good career prospects at their current companies, Horses for Sources (HfS) research has revealed.

The study, which sampled 168 buy-side enterprises, also revealed that the number dropped to 12 per cent when only employees with 0-2 years of industry experience were taken into account, suggesting that buyers of outsourcing must do more to create opportunities for their newer employees.

These findings were revealed during the ‘Sourcing Savants 2015’ webinar, hosted by Horses for Sources and moderated by HfS Research CEO Phil Fersht. The intention of the online seminar was to help attendees make more sense of the as-a-service economy.

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Read this next: Serco to Sell Off BPO Portfolio

Accenture shareholders and executives will be rejoicing today, after the company officially announced that it will be raising its full-year revenue growth forecast for a second time.

The multinational management consulting and outsourcing company also reported a higher quarterly profit than it originally expected. Shares in Accenture Plc rose by 3 per cent in premarket trading shortly after the news was broken.

However, Accenture will still be cutting the top end of its full-year earnings forecast range, due to the strength of the dollar on the FOREX.

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Read this next: Infosys and Accenture Compete for Australian Contract

Peter Phillips, Jamaica’s Finance Minister, has declared that strengthening the nation’s BPO industry will be used to drive economic growth and job creation.

Speaking in Parliament, Philips revealed that "A national five-year strategy for the expansion of the sector which, all things being equal, should increase [BPO] employment from the current levels of 15,000 to 30,000 by 2020 will be submitted to Cabinet shortly.”

"A strategic objective is to move Jamaica up in the value chain in the BPO industry from simple call centres up to knowledge processing centres, outsourcing more professional services such as legal and accounting support, software development and technical support service," he added.

Included in these plans is the re-appropriation of a 70,000 square foot facility in Kingston, which will serve to support BPO operations.

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Read this next: Mexico Threatens to Overtake Asia as #1 Offshore BPO Destination

Essex Police are ready to launch the Athena integrated information technology system at the end of March. The £32m IT system delivered by Northgate Public Services will be shared by seven forces over the next year.

The Athena programme has been the largest investment in police technology over the last decade and will allow information to be held on one easily searchable database, with the hope of preventing loopholes such as criminals, held by one police force, being missed by another.

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Read this next: Metropolitan Police Outsources 700 IT Roles to Save $800m

Thousands of residents of Lewisham, south-east London, have signed a letter to Monitor, the sector regulator for health services in the UK. In the letter, they accuse Monitor of pressuring London-based clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to put services out to tender, and urge the regulator not to do so.

The NHS’s official line on CCGs is that they ‘must not act in an anti-competitive way unless they can demonstrate it is in the interests of patients.’ The Lewisham campaigners are claiming that competition for NHS services is never in the interest of patients, and that they do not want their health services outsourced.

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Read this next: MPs Condemn Failure of NHS Outsourcing Contract

Top Indian ITO firms, such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS, are coming under increasing pressure to lower their prices in order to retain contracts with major customers, according to India’s Economic Times.

Several deals with marquee names including American Express and Home Depot are due for renewal imminently, and there is a strong feeling that cutting into margins to retain a healthy market share will be the best option going forward.

One Wipro executive, requesting anonymity, revealed that “We're definitely feeling the heat in some of our key accounts - and there's no way we can afford to lose a top customer since gaining new logos to make up for the shortfall is not an option.”

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Read this next: Infosys and Accenture Compete for Australian Contract

Harrow council has agreed a five-year ICT contract with Sopra Steria starting in November 2015. Sopra Steria will be replacing Capita as the council’s ICT supplier. The new deal includes applications, infrastructure, service transformation and management, all in accordance with ITIL standards.

Harrow were considering including non-ICT services as part of the outsourcing deal. However, this idea was dismissed due to concerns that it could risk them not getting the best available technology service provider. The council is now looking into shared service partners for their non-ICT functions.

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