Industry news

CCI BPO is the largest outsourcer in South Africa and is sponsoring the EOA Awards and NOA Conference. sourcingfocus.com caught up with Jamel Ziani, CCI BPO Managing Director, to discuss sourcing trends and what makes CCI BPO differant.

Can you define your business and your specialities?

Our Delivery Centre in Durban, South Africa is the home to 4000 Full Time Employees dedicated to serve our Clients across multiple verticals and industries. CCI BPO specialise in supporting our Clients who wish to outsource their Order to Cash Back office functions: From Credit Vetting to Payment Allocations, we offer to support the entire customer life cycle for our Clients with a team of fully trained Customer Representatives, Highly skilled Order to Cash Managers and dedicated Order to Cash Expert Lab® Executives

• Durban is the most culturally aligned South African city to the UK due to the high ex-pat population

• Located in the fastest growing commercial and residential growth markets in the country

• Largest skilled workforce pool in South Africa, which dramatically reduces recruitment and training lead times

• Accent Neutral area of South Africa which assists in optimal service delivery for international projects supporting our Clients in the UK, Ireland, USA and Australia

• 4000 agents serving our Clients in our unique state of the art Delivery Centre in Durban

• Expert teams dedicated to training and mentoring on site

• Order to Cash Expert Lab ® onsite delivering Innovation and Transformation to our Clients’ teams onsite but also within their retained organisations onshore

• 4 Order to Cash SMART Centres to support Delivery Excellence and Cost Optimisation

• Team Management solely sourced from the UK, Continental Europe, USA and Australia to meet Clients’ needs in terms of governance

Order to Cash is the end-to-end process that begins with managing customer credit worthiness and customers’ sales & services orders and ends with the collection and application of customer payments. These processes are focused on customer contact and collaboration, transaction processing and analytics.

Order to Cash encompasses the majority of activities typically referred to as “Accounts Receivables”. Success is measured by improved cash flow, fewer disputes, reduced bad debt and revenue leakage, increased customer satisfaction and enhanced process visibility and control. The Order to Cash process focuses on Collections and

Process Improvement to improve past due debt.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

At CCI BPO for Order to Cash, our main focus is to support our Clients’ Operations with four critical BPO Business Outcomes:

1. Working Capital Optimisation

2. Operating Cost Reduction

3. Revenue Maximisation

4. Customer Experience Improvement

At CCI BPO for Order to Cash, we offer more than ‘lift and shift’ engagements where savings are made from onshore labour pools being shifted offshore which provides the Clients with a one-time only cost savings lever on their P&L. Once we have done that for our Clients, our ability for further productivity gains and new business value is demonstrated through continuous process improvements, increased quality of technology delivery and innovative methods of service delivery.

We are dedicated to our Clients and their customers’ satisfaction this is why our Order to Cash Sales Executives our Clients meet during the introduction meetings and contracting process are also fully responsible for the delivery of the service for the whole duration of our partnership:

• We are easy to do business with at all levels of our Organisation

• We are dedicated to our Clients and strive to meet their needs

• We can adapt to our Clients’ business changes and scale up and down our delivery model very quietly to meet changes

• We deliver on our targets and always try to outperform to support our Client Growth

• We continuously offer Innovation to support productivity improvements and better business outcomes

In your opinion – what are the top 3 outsourcing hot topics / trends at the moment?

• Business outcomes outsourcing to support Client business growth instead of just cost to serve and offshoring

• Specialised outsourcing with expertise instead of generalists who can only offer offshoring and labour arbitrage cost reduction

• Change in contracting towards price per transaction instead of rigid FTE based contracting

NHS Wales have awarded a five-year contract to SME Software Europe to provide expenses management across Welsh NHS facilities, which is expected to deliver £750,000 in cost-savings.

The contract will cover the delivery of an online staff expenses system, designed to remove manual processing and paper administration. The new system will provide services for around 194,000 claimants.

Paul Thomas, assistant director of employment services at NHS Wales Shared Services, said: "We expect the system to help us provide a quicker reimbursement of travel expenses incurred by NHS staff.”

Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire councils have launched a shared services program designed to save £675,000 per year from back office expenses.

The partnership between the authorities within the two councils, known as ‘Go Shared Services’, will provide services in finance, procurement, and HR. While the service was expected to bring high-cost savings, the partnership was expected to result in job losses in roles to be shared.

Cotswold DC councillor Barry Dare, who is in charge of GO Shared Services at Cotswold, said: "We can now do more with less and, in many instances, do it better because we are bringing together a pool of expertise and experience."

Statoil, the Norwegian oil giant, plans to invest £18 billion in U.K North Sea oil fields. The move would see the creation of 300 jobs.

The move comes after Statoil previously announced the creation of 700 jobs from a £6 billion investment. The investment would last the lifetime of the North Sea fields with the potential to provide 800 million barrels of oil.

David Cameron commented after meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, on creating closer energy links between the two countries, that the move represented "a big investment into North Sea production."

Vodafone has taken a controlling stake of Vouchercloud, a mobile based savings firm, with 57 percent ownership.

Vouchercloud who has just entered the Irish market, provide discounts and vouchers to a wide range of UK shops, restaurants and leisure providers. The service is tied to a GPS service which provides the location of the closest offers.

The move comes as Vodafone looks to deliver on mobile commerce. Vodafone commercial development director Tobin Ireland said: “Mobile couponing is set to grow rapidly across Vodafone's businesses as cost-conscious consumers increasingly turn to their smartphones to hunt for bargains and collect loyalty points."

A new £2m supercomputer which will help scientists study the universe has got the go-ahead after funding was awarded to the University of Leicester.

It will be used by academics to help them understand the formation of stars and planets.

The university has been selected as one of four sites to host national high performance computing (HPC) facilities.

Dr Mark Wilkinson from the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the University of Leicester is the principal scientist for the project. He said: “This is incredibly exciting news. We will now be able to carry out the largest and most detailed simulations of planets, stars and galaxies that have ever been performed and answer questions that we could not even have asked just a few years ago.”

Mobile giant operators Vodafone and Telefonica have announced plans to combine network infrastructures in order to deliver 4G services.

The companies expect that the plans to create one shared grid will increase the coverage of the current 4G network while speeding up the deployment of super-fast 4G services. The cooperative sharing of network resources will enable the companies to deliver 4G mobile services by 2015.

Ovum predict that Vodafone and Telefonica cooperation is the future

Vodafone UK chief executive, Guy Laurence, commented: "This partnership will close the digital divide for millions of people across the country and power the next phase of the smartphone revolution."

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle said in a webcast this week, that the company was ready to deliver "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth."

Oracles Public Cloud which will feature per-month and per-user pricing, will allow customers to choose bespoke models that fit personal needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach which has been the approach offered by other major cloud suppliers.

Oracle has been in direct competition with Salesforce.com with both companies acquiring social media service capabilities in recent months in order to extend their market dominance. Ellison spoke out against other cloud services lack of security in comparison to Oracles Public Cloud, saying, "It's a big difference between our cloud and others on the market."

Talks between CSC and the NHS have been extended to the 31st of August after the 1st of June deadline was reached without a final agreement.

The 1 June deadline had already been extended from April in the effort to resolve talks surrounding valuation reductions and the scope of the contract.

The new August extension does not necessarily provide closure, with CSC stating in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, that “there can be no assurance that CSC and NHS will enter into the interim agreement or any amendment the existing agreement”.

Nuffield Health, the UK’s largest health charity with over 300 UK facilities, is planning to move all existing IT services onto a cloud-based architecture.

The company has selected HP CloudSystem to support a centralised IT infrastructure, in order to increase flexibility and speed within the IT system, while providing cost-savings.

Claire Myerson, CIO at Nuffield Health, said: “We selected HP to help us on the cloud journey from a largely physical environment to a more virtualised platform with a geographically resilient infrastructure."