Industry news

Monaghan Mushrooms has signed a two-year deal with Belfast IT and business process outsourcing firm Equiniti ICS. The contract concerns off-shore software development support and will be delivered from centres in Northern Ireland and India. Outsourcing is expected to play a major part in the growth of the Irish mushroom producer.

npower has created 200 new positions in the north east, and hopes to fill them by the end of March. The call centre jobs are available in: Peterlee, Houghton le Spring and Thornaby.

Paul Robinson, head of npower’s contact centres, said: “We have noticed a significant increase in demand from our customers which is why we are growing our contact centres. These jobs are designed to bolster our team and ensure we can deliver the very best service to customers. We hope to attract a wide variety of applicants from across the region. This is also great news for the North East with the creation of 200 new jobs at a time when a number of organisations are reducing the size of their workforces.”

The company that owns Harvester, O’Neills and Toby Carvery is rolling out cloud computing across the whole group. Mitchells & Butlers, the largest restaurant and pub operator in the UK, has partnered with Fujitsu to extend networked SaaS to its 1,600 branches.

Mike Sackman, chief information officer at Mitchells & Butlers said:

"Customers will be able to book tables, and place orders including takeaways from their smartphones, and access public wifi in our branches. There is a revolution in what our customers want to be able to do with their own technology. We will also be able to offer much more personalised promotion and marketing to them."

Rhapsody has acquired Napster's European operation, marking the music streaming service's first move beyond the US market and kicking off a battle with Spotify.

The US service, which has only been available to American customers for the past 11 years, has reached a deal to acquire Napster International's subscription music business.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, will see Rhapsody launch in the UK and Germany under the Napster brand name and take the fight to the increasingly popular Spotify.

Outsourcing company Capita has confirmed it is to create a further 40 jobs at its contact centre in Moray.

The new roles come on top of 100 jobs announced by the company in November, as they expand their operations in Forres.

The latest posts range from customer services to senior management positions.

Vodafone and Teleperformance, a UK leader in outsourced customer services, have announced a new strategic partnership which will see Teleperformance taking on some of the work currently managed at Vodafone’s Newark contact centre.

This new partnership will see the transfer of 207 roles in three of Vodafone’s specialist operations team to Teleperformance. This will mean continuous employment for these individuals with the same terms and conditions.

Teleperformance has been chosen for their experience and expertise as a leader in the provision of customer services in the business sector. The partnership underlines the importance of Vodafone’s operations in Newark and our commitment to provide the best service for all business customers.

Alistair Niederer, CEO of Teleperformance said: “This will be a true collaboration with Vodafone and the partnership will ensure a great future for the Newark contact centre and the services we can provide for business customers. We look forward to welcoming our new colleagues over the coming months.”

According to the Autumn 2011 Labour Market Outlook research from the CIPD, the number of UK firms planning to offshore jobs to other parts of the world decreased from 10% to just 6% in the past year. If you look at these figures for the private sector alone, this drop in ‘offshoring intentions’ was even more precipitous, down from 16% in autumn 2010 to 9% in autumn 2011.

The reasons behind this change are clear: not only has the cost of offshoring to many of the most popular offshore locations increased in recent years because of rising wages, but many of the costs associated with offshore project management have also gone up. As a result, many banks and other financial services firms are seeing a significant reduction in their offshore margins.

Of course, rising costs are just one factor, and few would argue that onshoring is more attractive than offshoring based on wage inflation alone. However, along with these rising costs, a number of practical challenges associated with offshoring have also become more apparent over the years, including logistical/time zone challenges, language difficulties, cultural differences, data security concerns, and/or incompatible IT systems.

Onshoring offers the perfect solution to many of these problems, which is why many financial services organisations are starting to partner with nearshore and onshore outsourcers as a way of streamlining their operations, tightening their internal controls, and creating a more collaborative development process that makes it easier to bring a wide range of compliant and customer-friendly products to the market very quickly.

This last point – collaboration – is especially important in this regard, since many of today’s financial services firms are now aiming to launch new products in just 30-60 days. Short timescales like these are entirely achievable, but a close partnership with a firm’s outsourcing partner will be essential, since frequent, real-time communication will be a vital ingredient in delivering this level of efficiency.

Also, by working with an UK-based outsourcer in an area like third-party administration, banks can now delegate the responsibility for all of their customer communications with confidence, along with product distribution, complaint handling, marketing and more, since it is much easier for these onshore partners to embed themselves in the heart of the bank's operations. As a result, financial institutions will be able to devote their time and energy towards selling a whole new generation of easy-to-understand, fully compliant products that are in tune with their culture and brand and which will satisfy customers and regulators alike.

Even with all of these benefits, however, no one is suggesting that onshoring is going to completely replace offshoring any time soon; certain activities will continue to benefit from ‘follow-the-sun’ processing and reduced labour costs. However, a strategy that brings an onshore element into the mix can undoubtedly offer enormous benefits, since greater collaboration in the form of face-to-face contact, regular meetings and timely feedback can speed up the time-to-market for new financial products considerably.

And make no mistake: in a market where financial services businesses are fighting it out to secure market share and keep hold of their customers, every second counts.

How many people recognise a scenario of a never-ending project, with endless meetings about meetings, with consultants tying users in knots with jargon-laden presentations, gant charts, and flow diagrams? That’s what a Times reader asked last week, and it struck a chord.

He went on to suggest that many people in meetings don’t have a clue what’s being said/going on but lack the balls to say so, to challenge what’s being said and demand some much needed clarification, for fear of looking stupid or appearing negative.

So how many people empathise with that situation? A lot I’d guess…

Working client-side, I’ve been through meetings about corporate rebrands, with consultants who come copiously armed with acronyms, casually dropping buzzwords, seeming to thrive on the blank looks and vacant nods reflecting back at them. I’ve even seen clients volleying suppliers’ buzzwords back at them, reinforcing the façade that everyone understands what the **** is going on.

This, obviously, is startlingly bad form.

There’s no such question as a stupid question. If it needs asking, then the person presenting is the one at fault – in communication, the person receiving and perceiving is king (or queen!). And in business, the customer is king. But when hired as an expert, maybe the supplier knows best?

Wrong. Well, sort of. Both parties know best, in different ways. You know your business, they know theirs. Work it out together. It’s that middle ground where that killer solution is found, and the masterplan is drawn up.

That’s why suppliers and clients should challenge one another. In plain English, with metaphors and analogies as required, to ensure deep understanding within all concerned. ‘Simple is a dirty word these days’, says our man in the Times. I don’t agree with that at all. Simple is genius. Over-complication is a cloak to disguise where genius (or even good old common sense) is sadly lacking. There’s a great quote from American bluesman Woody Guthrie: “Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

So, if it sounds dead complicated, it’s probably not the masterpiece you were hoping for.

Nodding and smiling, when, underneath the surface you’ve got a burning question, can turn out to be a serious waste of money. And who’s got money to waste, these days? So know what you want, know how to ask for it. And speak your mind, all the time.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the last few years have seen a sea change in attitudes towards offshoring. For many organisations, what began as a very attractive cost cutting strategy is now becoming a challenge compared to providing the same service in-house. There are a number of reasons why an increasing number of businesses are starting to bring key areas back in-house, but it’s nonetheless clear that a significant number of businesses have totally underestimated the impact caused by replacing key in-house skills with outsourced staff in offshore locations.

One of the principle cost drivers for this about turn is that IT salary inflation in emerging markets such as India and China is now becoming a major issue. The cost of retaining the resource base in these markets is growing much faster than the West (eg 3-5 times) and putting great pressure on the budgets of companies that use them as a result.

There’s no doubt that an increase in the levels of competition for skilled employees in countries like India and staff turnover of key, skilled staff is also playing a key role in this process, levels of turnover of 15% and above are common. After all, outsourcers exert a great deal of effort to retain skilled staff, while some workers chase the best wage and benefits from role to role, sometimes flouting employment law and best practice in the process.

However, it’s also true that organisations have chased cheap 'day rates' and services around the world under the assumption that cheaper day rates will automatically result in lower overall costs. However, this assumption tends to made without fully considering or even understanding the potential drop in productivity or time-to-market for new products. Organisations have subsequently found that although they were originally buying an offshore service, they have ended up with large numbers being transferred onshore, with extra costs, as communication issues arise and the need to work closely with their business counterparts becomes apparent.

As a result, there’s a growing acceptance from businesses that they now need to be much more selective about how they approach offshoring, as well as a more strategic approach to what can be effectively outsourced to an offshore provider. As a consequence, CIOs are beginning to realise the importance of having much better resourcing strategies in place to get the blend between in-house and offshore staff and skills right. As productivity and time-to-market become increasingly influential factors, CIOs need to be able to articulate this argument convincingly so that they can persuade their Financial Directors that cheaper days rates does not always mean cheaper overall costs.

So what’s the future for offshoring? Clearly there will always be a need for services to be provided in locations where commodity skills and experience is plentiful. However, as more businesses begin to recognise the importance of using offshoring strategically, and more sparingly, we’ll continue to see more and more of them moving selective services back in-house.

Motivation and drivers play a key factor in outsourced recruitment and talent management processes, but on a global scale what really engages staff will vary from place to place. As the Asia Pacific region becomes increasingly important to the global economy, organisations in this area need to ask themselves what really motivates their employees.

Typically in western culture, the criteria used by employees to gauge whether their career is advancing tend to focus on three key factors:

1. Am I developing my skills in my role?

2. Are my skills good enough that I can teach others?

3. As I improve, am I being recognised by my superiors and rewarded appropriately and financially?

It doesn’t always work the same way in Asia Pac though. The measures employees tend to rate their career progression on, in rank order, are:

1. The professional title on my business card – what status do I get from this? How does it affect the way the world sees me?

2. How much money do I earn - determining the level of pride my family have in me and the more I can pay for in support

3. How many people do I manage? What does this mean for my status and influence in the business.

So, as long as job title, money and team size are moving north, many employees are likely to believe their career is advancing; skills and abilities rarely factor anywhere in these considerations.

As larger numbers of employers look to attract and retain talent by meeting the criteria required by staff they are, in effect, creating over inflated expectations within the workforce, an issue the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) industry in the region must deal with.

With the emphasis placed on job title and status, the result is a workforce with highly ranked titles whereby the job requirements don’t necessarily align with those of similar titles globally. As organisations increasingly begin operating at an international level this can cause disconnect between similar, internal roles across the globe.

For example, if a company opens an office in Spain, an Asia Pacific employee applying for the same job title in the new office may struggle as they come up against external recruits with the same title but more experience and skills. In order to balance this out, employers and RPO organisations themselves will need to work at shifting the perceptions of career development in the region.

Perhaps, as the west has lots to learn from the east, so too do we have something new to bring to the table. It is impossible to change hundreds of years worth of culture and that is certainly not what we are recommending.

Ultimately this is not going to change unless employers understand not only how they should approach the workforce, and why, but also that any change will be a slow and subtle process. Adjusting a behaviour which has been engrained over an extended period of time cannot be done overnight. Instead APAC organisations should be encouraging staff to stop and analyse their career progression, their skills and where this can take them.

The current situation with job mobility and candidate driven motivations is unlikely to continue forever and once this changes the APAC workforce may struggle when it is no longer so easy to leave a job for more personal reasons rather than career progression. The impact this has on both employers and the workforce can be reduced if small changes are encouraged sooner rather than later.