Industry news

Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, has announced that it has won a €42 million (£35.9 million) contract renewal with International Paper, a global paper and packaging company. The contract extension until 2018 covers the existing full scope of Finance and Accounting (F&A) services and will bring the total collaboration period to 19 years – one of the longest relationships in the BPO sector.

International Paper, a Fortune 500 company and a global leader in the paper and packaging industry, operates in more than 20 countries, employs over 60,000 people and serves customers worldwide. The company’s businesses include uncoated papers and industrial and consumer packaging with primary markets and manufacturing operations in North and Latin America, Europe, Russia, Asia and North Africa.

Harry Wauters, Director Global Financial Shared Services Centers from International Paper: “We were looking for a company with a robust F&A platform to support our objectives which could be flexible and scaled up and down according to our business needs. We chose to extend our relationship with Capgemini because of their outstanding collaborative approach, their added value beyond the agreed service scope and their strong focus on continuous improvement. They have demonstrated to us over numerous years their dedication to deliver innovative and adaptable solutions.”

Cognizant, a leading provider of consulting, technology, and business process outsourcing services, today announced a multi-year agreement with AstraZeneca to deliver comprehensive biostatistics and medical reporting services to generate clinical study reports.

Under the agreement, Cognizant will provide centralized statistical programming, statistical analysis, medical writing, and document publishing services, spanning the entire chain of clinical data reporting from case report forms to clinical study reports. This will enable AstraZeneca to increase operational efficiency, reduce cycle times, and optimize costs. AstraZeneca will continue to own and manage key scientific and medical activities associated with the design of clinical trial programs, and the interpretation of data from them.

“Cognizant will help us streamline our clinical development operations. This is key to our business transformation aimed at achieving greater efficiency, agility, flexibility, and global competitiveness – all of which are crucial to clinical trials and development of new drugs,” said Karin Wingstrand, Vice President and Head of Clinical Development at AstraZeneca. “Leveraging Cognizant’s IT and business process expertise allows AstraZeneca to focus more time, energy, and investment on those clinical activities that will make a difference in developing innovative medicines more quickly for patients.”

Leading animal welfare charity, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has enlisted Trimble’s telematics technology to help field and support staff rescue and collect thousands of animals throughout England and Wales every year.

The RSPCA is rolling out Trimble® GeoManager Fleet Management solution in its vehicles across the UK. Benefits include real-time visibility into the location of its vehicles on the road to help dispatchers make more informed decisions about which inspector is both best equipped and closest to any animal in need of immediate assistance.

The system will also allow the RSPCA Fleet Management Team to track the location and safety of animal welfare and collection officers involved with supporting the RSPCA charitable objectives. This increased efficiency in scheduling can help the RSPCA in ensuring greater overall effectiveness in fleet management through reduced fuel use, lower CO2 emissions and increased driver safety.

Interoute, owner and operator of Europe's largest cloud services platform, has announced that it is supporting international sports broadcaster, Eurosport, to meet increased demand for multi-media streaming generated by its business applications. By enhancing its VPN network, Eurosport has doubled its capacity and expanded its Virtual Private Network across 20 sites.

Interoute is working with Eurosport, to provide a high capacity network that supports its broadcast business and meets the increasing demand for multi-media streaming in business applications. The new network has been designed with the future demands of the sport channel’s content in mind.

The new Eurosport MPLS VPN network will connect 12 major European cities, including Germany, Spain, Poland, England, Switzerland, Sweden, and Paris, and smaller sites in parts of Asia and Europe, such as Tokyo, Dubai, Lisbon, Oslo, Copenhagen and Helsinki will also be connected to the Eurosport network via an IPsec VPN.

“We were faced with the challenge of how to improve our network performance and our costs, and selected Interoute as sole operator on all of our private and public networks to help us achieve this goal,” said Pascal Delorme, Systems and Networks Manager at Eurosport. “We have increased the number of sites on our MPLS VPN from 12 to 20, with the main sites fully managed by Interoute. We also have an IPsec solution implemented on secondary sites, which we can manage locally, allowing us to integrate new sites at lower costs.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that product mis-selling in financial services has been consigned to the pages of history following the high-profile Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal that has dominated the news headlines in recent years. But you’d be wrong. New rules to prevent the mis-selling of a new generation of structured products have just been published by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

This new guidance is aimed at financial services firms that plan to design any future structured products. In particular, the FSA's guidance stresses that firms need to ensure that these products reflect their customers’ needs more closely, and ultimately have consumers' best interests at heart.

Having dealt with its own fair share of complaints in the past few years, the OFT has weighed in on this issue as well. Its guidance goes on to say that all firms should ensure that their consumers are clear about the nature, price and implications of any structured products being sold.

To most people, this advice probably sounds like common sense, and you may be left wondering whether we really need the FSA and OFT to tell financial services firms to put more time and thought into product design. However, the real problem with many structured products is that they are not ‘fit for purpose’ for the consumer they are being sold to. Indeed, this key failing is as much a problem of product design as anything else.

The design of fully compliant, customer-friendly financial services products requires an enormous amount of forethought, planning and strategic vision – which is precisely why many financial services firms outsource this process to companies that specialise in this area. Not only is outsourcing a much faster way to launch a new product (with some products ready to launch in less than 30 days), but it also makes it much easier to comply with the latest regulations in areas like Treating Customers Fairly (TCF), Conduct of Business (COB) rules, the Data Protection Act (DPA) and many more.

For firms operating in this sector, this has to be their number one goal. After all, the financial services sector has become more competitive than ever in recent years, with companies increasingly fighting to differentiate themselves in an over-crowded market. A key part of this battle will be the ability to design transparent, fairly priced financial products that appeal to the greatest number of potential investors. And structured products do have their place – if designed, marketed and sold correctly.

However, even though it’s essential to get the design of these products right from the start, that’s still only half the battle: in order to avoid any future mis-selling issues, financial services firms will also need to make sure that any subsequent marketing is done correctly and appropriately, so that consumers can understand exactly what they’re buying after a new product has been launched.

A common fear among firms in this sector is that they will need to build whole new systems and address large-scale administration and regulatory requirements in order to design, market and administer new financial products like these correctly, but that’s not the case. By working with a specialist outsourcer, financial institutions can actually delegate the vast majority of these responsibilities, and focus instead on creating easy-to-understand, fully compliant products that are in tune with their culture and brand, and which will satisfy both their customers and the regulators.

Optimising business-critical document processes can play a major role in improving overall business performance, helping to increase profitability and enabling an organisation to respond more quickly to customer needs.

Yet still more than half of those in the legal sector, increasing to 64 per cent in Financial Services[1] admit that they could increase the efficiency of their existing processes, according to recent research by Coleman Parkes. Furthermore, over one quarter of all business critical documents are still being processed in hard copy in both legal and financial services. Inevitably, this leaves them more susceptible to errors, processes are unnecessarily labour intensive and the efficiency of client service levels is impacted. So, isn’t it time to outsource?

The outsourcing market is continuing to steadily rise across the globe. A recent EMEA TPI Index showed that in the UK and Ireland market alone, the complete revenue for 2011 is expected to surpass last year’s total by over 10 per cent with Europe, the Middle East and Africa set to increase its third quarter, year on year total by 99 per cent[2]. More and more organisations are realising how outsourcing complex processes will have a positive impact on business productivity, enhancing information flow and freeing up staff to focus on areas of the business that create more value.

Also, the Coleman Parkes research also revealed that over one third (36 per cent) of UK business leaders stated that they would, or already have outsourced their business critical document processes to improve efficiencies.

So what is holding the other businesses back? According to the survey, 61 per cent of those who aren’t considering outsourcing cite security concerns and 34 per cent said they do not want to lose control of their processes.

It is clear that further education and awareness are needed to help businesses determine the most efficient routes to process optimisation. Security concerns can be easily overcome by implementing software that will protect, track and audit how valuable information flows across the organisation. Also, organisations and outsourcers need to work together to overcome such concerns by establishing a partnership approach, instead of simply focusing on one-off efficiency gains.

A business document outsourcing company should have an in-depth understanding of how they can optimise business critical processes and how they fit within their client’s wider business activity. Also key is to understand the way their employees work, and the IT service requirements of the organisation. This approach needs to be matched with an internal collaborative effort between the CIO, CFO and COO in the boardroom.

By embracing outsourcing and working with a partner they trust, companies really can transform their business. They can also reduce any unnecessary overheads created as a result of outdated document processes, improve information flow and ultimately drive savings across the entire organisation.

Old habits die hard, so don’t fight them. Instead give your staff collaboration tools they will actually use

Back in the 60s the only technology on an employee’s desk, if they were lucky enough to have any at all, was a telephone. Things have changed dramatically since then, and today we are surrounded by an array of technology that we use for work – from PCs, mobile phones, laptops and tablets to a hodgepodge of collaboration and social tools – all designed to make us productive in the office and, now also, on-the-go.

Given such a rich tapestry of tools, why does Forrester Research report across-the-board underutilization of collaboration and social tools, with 64% of surveyed businesses receiving few benefits, if any, from their investments?

The technology adoption gap

Human nature is arguably the main factor that inhibits the adoption of new technology – people don’t like change. The reality is, when presented with an alternative way of doing something, we tend to overvalue the way we already do it while undervaluing the new option. Harvard Business School marketing professor, John Gourville, sums it up as 'People irrationally overvalue benefits they currently possess relative to those that they don't'. In fact, according to Gourville's 'what you have' theory, a new product, service or process has to be nine times better than what a user is already using, or is doing, if it is to motivate them enough to change their behaviour or adopt a new product or technology.

Why nine times? Well, his premise is that the people peddling change will overvalue their fantastic new offering by a factor of three. In parallel, users tend to undervalue the benefits of the proposed change by a factor of three.

A second key factor impacting technology adoption is our reliance on an abundance of digital devices and stand-alone applications to get work done. Office workers switch programs some 37 times an hour, according to research reported by the New York Times. Dealing with too much information, and Alt-tabbing between too many potentially useful-but disjointed tools, is a constant mental locomotion that robs us of our ability to focus, think creatively, and generally take care of the responsibilities we were hired for. And that costs money.

So when change is called for, it is critically important to recognize common pitfalls and take steps to make sure the right technology solution gets implemented, with as little friction as possible. Here are some questions to consider:

• Is all that glitters gold? People are all too often lured into thinking they need something entirely new to solve a problem. Rather than first looking at what they have and why it isn’t being utilized, they make significant investments in a host of new technologies, creating yet another information silo for users to disregard. Jive is a perfect example. It seems it can do almost anything, with its robust feature set and top notch analytics capabilities, but social business leader Jacob Morgan questions if this is really what organizations need or want. He explains, “Many companies are just trying to hang picture frames and Jive is trying to offer the ability to tear down walls.” In his blog, Morgan postulates that perhaps 20-50% of Jive’s features are actually adopted.

• How do people do the task today? Dazzled by what the latest, greatest product or service promises it can do, many organizations neglect to think about how people would need to radically change their work habits to realise these gains. For example, an age old problem is the document development process. Business users invariably ping-pong multiple document versions back and forth, wasting time wrestling with the resultant document chaos and creating compliancy risks down the road. Web 2.0 pundits argue wikis activity streams and real time status updates will replace the “archaic” document concept. But the reality is, today, business people are creating and sharing more contracts, resumes, presentations and financial analyses than ever before. So documents won’t suddenly disappear, but they do need to become more social to be relevant in an Enterprise 2.0 world.

• Is resistance futile? Faced with the shock of new and/or unknown technologies, most people will dig in their heels rather than change. Email is an excellent case in point. If I had a dime for every eulogy written for email in the last few years, I wouldn't be writing this article, I would be sailing on my yacht in the Bahamas. But email isn't going anywhere soon. Rather, like documents, email will evolve.

So, how do you get users to change? Here are three things to consider that are often overlooked.

Technology

Consider how new products, or even changes to current solutions, will be used and fit within your existing parameters.

Currently, according to Forrester Research, only 20% of business workers use team document sharing sites such as Microsoft SharePoint daily. These user adoption gaps stem largely from the complex multi-step navigation required when completing tasks, not on inherent deficiencies in the product itself. Therefore, look at how incumbent products and existing working practices can be matched. For example, simplifying SharePoint tasks by bringing them into the place where people work, like email, is one way to take SharePoint and make it useful to every business user. Several products provide this type of functionality.

Training

Forrester Research estimates that, for every $1 invested in purchasing collaboration software, $6-7 will need to be spent on training and getting people to use it. Rather than try to streamline training, how about figuring out ways to obviate the need for training? The closer the solution matches the current workflow, the less training will be needed. In fact, enterprises that integrate SharePoint collaboration and social features within their email client have realized dramatic improvements in the way their workforce operates, without drastically changing what they are already doing, because their workforce adopts SharePoint en masse for collaboration.

Plan for ‘Larry in the Mailroom’

It’s important, when implementing change, that everyone in the business is considered. As it’s impractical to consult every member of the workforce, a cross section that ensures everyone in the business is represented should be consulted so that the business needs are clearly defined in real scenarios and the implications of introducing new processes and/or technology can be fully explored. User reactions will help determine how to progress, changes made, and training offered before universal implementation is conducted.

This process doesn’t just influence users to embrace change but can also have a knock on effect to other areas of the business. So when Larry, our mailroom clerk, hears about sales achieving double digit revenue growth by establishing global peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, he helps streamline deliveries by instigating a worldwide learning community. Aka social business in action.

Ultimately, technology is only worthwhile if it is embraced so plan for change even before you sign on the dotted line.

FCC, one of the world's top services, infrastructures and renewable energy companies, has signed a 50 million Euros agreement with BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications services and solutions, for the delivery of global data network and fixed communications services for a period of five years.

This agreement covers more than 50 countries in four continents - from Egypt to France, from the UAE to Russia, from Peru to Singapore and the United States. It includes wide and local area networking services, fixed voice services, video conferencing and remote access for more than 12,000 users located in approximately 850 sites.

The Government has published its new Cyber Security Strategy, setting out how the UK will support economic prosperity, protect national security and safeguard the public’s way of life by building a more trusted and resilient digital environment. It heralds a new era of unprecedented cooperation between the Government and the private sector on cyber security, working hand in hand to make the UK one of the most secure places in the world to do business.

The Government has already ranked cyber security as a tier 1 national security priority and committed £650m over the next four years to bolster its cyber defences. The UK is also leading the way on the world stage, earlier this month hosting the London Conference on Cyberspace to drive forward international dialogue on building a secure digital world.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: “While the internet is undoubtedly a force for social and political good, as well as crucial to the growth of our economy, we need to protect against the threats to our security. This strategy not only deals with the threat from terrorists to our national security, but also with the criminals who threaten our prosperity as well as blight the lives of many ordinary people through cyber crime."

The European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee has approved a report written by Labour MEP Michael Cashman which seeks to open EU institutions to public scrutiny and extend the rights of European citizens to access EU documents.

The committee backed Cashman’s amendments to draft public access legislation by 33 votes to 17. The changes seek to improve transparency, accountability and democracy within EU institutions and they will now be considered at next month’s Strasbourg Plenary, when the Parliament will vote on the proposed legislation.

Michael, who has spent the last ten years fighting to open up EU institutions, said: “What we are talking about is a right that allows citizens to make sure that we are accountable; parliamentarians accountable for what we do in their name, the Commission for what it does in their name, and, equally, the Council of Ministers."