Industry news

Sage has acquired PayChoice, a privately held provider of payroll solutions for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). The cost of the takeover is estimated to be around £100 million. PayChoice, who are based in New Jersey, provide full service and self-service payroll and HR servicers to over 100,000 SMB’s in the US. With this acquisition Sage will become an industry leader in online payroll solutions for small businesses.

Noonan acquires Resource for undisclosed sum

Infosys have signed a partnership agreement with China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to offer customers more cloud services. Infosys are set to rapidly increase its cloud-based services after recently expanding partnerships with Microsoft Corp and Hitachi Ltd. The partnership will combine Infosys’s service expertise with Huawei’s cloud infrastructure. Infosys expect the expansion of cloud-based services will help put them back at the forefront of India’s IT Industry.

BP sign 5 year Outsourcing deal with Infosys

When arvato launched its award-winning report series Open Outsourcing in 2012, we wanted to create a channel to explore some of the most important topics in our industry and share a real-world perspective on outsourcing partnerships.

After looking at the importance of engagement between outsourcer and client in 2012 and supporting organisational and economic growth in last year’s report, we felt that it was time to turn our attention to the individuals at the heart of partnerships in the third edition – out next week.

Outsourcing is a services industry and a ‘people’ business. It’s not just about what KPIs are agreed, which systems and processes are put in place or why a partnership was set up in the first place; ultimately, it’s the people who deliver the results and make the relationship succeed – or fail.

It’s a fact that the NOA has been stressing relentlessly in its work; a recent NOA survey found that 65 per cent of outsourcing clients believe that the quality of the people is the most important factor influencing outsourcing service quality. To support standards and training in outsourcing, the NOA also launched the industry’s first Level 2 qualification, the ‘NOA Award in Outsourcing Excellence’, at the beginning of this month.

While employees are naturally in the focus at the beginning of a partnership and during the transition – especially if it involves TUPE – our report clearly demonstrates that our industry needs to put people at its heart at every step of the outsourcing lifecycle. This becomes even more important as the drivers for outsourcing evolve beyond cost cutting measures alone.

What is it like to work for an outsourcer? Why is it that people are often concerned about being outsourced? How can you create real teams across organisations? How do you motivate individuals to grow and develop in a new and sometimes very different environment? How can people help organisations deal with evolving technologies and social change? What do they need to become empowered to do so?

In ‘Empowering People’, we explore these and other questions with the help of our clients, industry experts, and, most importantly, employees.

Zara.com reveals how training and a team spirit ensures our customer service representatives act as real ambassadors for its brand; the chief executive of Chesterfield Borough Council, Huw Bowen, talks about how a shared vision and real partnership means transferred employees still identify themselves with both the council and arvato.

We hear from East Cheshire NHS Trust about the communication and governance models it uses with its outsourced HR teams to ensure smooth processes across organisational boundaries and ultimately help deliver better patient outcomes; and we travel to the Netherlands, where an empowered team converses with citizens via Twitter, on behalf of the Dutch Central Government.

As with previous reports, we have invited industry experts to share their insights, too. Contributions include an article from Professor Paul Sparrow, Lancaster University Management School and Dr Jill Miller, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), on the effects of collaborative work settings on employee productivity. Plus an interview with Anne-Marie Stagg, Chief Executive of the Call Centre Management Association explores the role of people in customer service partnerships.

Finally, we share top tips for clients and outsourcing partners on how to create an environment that motivates and helps individuals and organisations succeed. It becomes clear that empowerment is the key to unlocking people’s potential throughout every stage of the outsourcing partnership, and that any partnership can only ever be as good as its people.

Open Outsourcing: Empowering People – will be available to download from http://www.arvato.co.uk/open-outsourcing from next week. We hope you’ll enjoy reading the report. As ever, we’re keen to hear your thoughts and ideas for future topics of Open Outsourcing, so please get in touch by email at {encode="openoutsourcing@arvato.co.uk" title="openoutsourcing@arvato.co.uk "}to share your feedback.

The Dublin-based organisation, Noonan, has purchased outsourcing giant Resource and consequently has helped to protect the jobs of more than 6,000 of Resource's employees, 2400 of those based in Northern Ireland.

According to the report in Belfast Telegraph, the purchase comes after receivers and administrators were appointed to some companies in the Resource group on Thursday. Resource Group delivers facility services across the private and public sectors in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

Noonan was established in 1977, and with more than 7,500 employees is Ireland’s largest provider of Strategically Outsourced Services.

Capita acquired SouthWestern

The Academy Enterprise Trust, the largest academy chain in the country with 77 schools, is planning to outsource all non-teaching jobs to for profit organisations within the next month. The trust has selected PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as a partner in the plan and has proposed to set up a limited liability partnership which would be paid up to £400m of taxpayers money over 10 years. They will be responsible for providing IT staff, librarians, caretakers, speech and language therapy to name a few. PwC do not have a background in such services so is expected to subcontracts to other private companies.

Lewisham develop new ICT Framework for Education

AstraZeneca opens a $9 million IT facility in Chennai, India as part of their plan to bring services back in house after outsourcing for 13 years. They plan to open a second site in San Francisco in 2015 and a third in Eastern Europe in the next two years. Currently 70% of the IT spend is with third party suppliers however the plan is to reduce this to 30% in the next three years. Bringing their IT services in house AstraZeneca hope that they will be able to reduce their costs, increase efficiencies and make their data safer.

AstraZeneca moves to buy respiratory drug specialist Pearl

Leading LPO provider, NewGalexy has launched cloud-based solution ContractPod™ to enable general counsel and law firms to manage 'cost and efficiency' challenges.

This solution enables legal departments to gain “single touch point” control across the lifecycle of every single document – right from contract assembly, approval workflow, negotiation, revisions and renewals through to termination.

NewGalexy have also partnered with Uberall Solutions Limited to produce NewGalexy Practice League - an enterprise practice management system (PMS) for small to medium sized firms.

For more information, visit www.newgalexy.com.

The department for Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland (HSCNI) has selected HP and Business Services Organisation (BSO) to transform their data centre infrastructure, refresh patient administration systems and implement regional e-prescribing system. The £100m agreement will last 4 years and is expected to support up to 1.7m people in the region. HP have been tasked to make the current ICT system agile. HP and BSO will be working with multiple suppliers and SME’s to delivery services and products during this contract.

According to an article in The Telegraph, IT outsourcing supplier Hewlett-Packard predicts massive transformation for Britain’s tax and benefit infrastructure should Scotland vote “Yes”.

HP are developing contingency plans for both scenarios, however separating the IT systems used in HP’s deal with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) should Scotland gain independence, will take time, effort and money.

It is estimated by the Treasury that setting up a new IT system to pay benefits will cost a Scottish government £400m. Whitehall has also estimated that there would be another bill of £500m to create new systems to handle tax administration, due to happen by 2020 on Alex Salmond’s schedule. HP would be expected to bid for the extra work.

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Saudi Aramco, General Electric (GE) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have jointly opened the first Saudi all female business process outsourcing (BPO) service centre. With the aim of providing 3000 jobs to Saudi women over the next three years this service centre will specialise in finance, accounting, HR, material supply and library services.

Supported by the Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF), the staff have been trained in communication and presentation skills, corporate etiquette, global culture and basic computer programmes such as Microsoft Office and Excel. This new venture will bring significant value in diversifying the economy and society and will help address the challenge of creating jobs for talented and skilled females in Saudi.