The world of work has become a very, very different place in just a few short years. Today’s workers need to adapt, develop and promote their skills to make themselves attractive in today’s Digital economy – and savvy employers need to try harder than ever to ensure they are finding staff who can do more than simply transact – they increasingly want people who can think, create, analyze, collaborate and sell; people who are embracing today’s technology to create value to their organization. Ambitious employers want talented workers which can align themselves with where they want their businesses to go, not with the legacy environment from where they are trying to evolve.
So what better strategy to adopt than hire a service provider to take care of this talent headache for you? Surely it’s time to explain to your HR department that fishing through resumes on LinkedIn is unlikely going to net you the best people? Surely it’s time to partner with a recruiting expert that can quickly understand your business, the talent you need, and how to go out into today’s people marketplace to find it?
So we tasked our global workforce and talent expert, Christa Degnan Manning, to assess those services providers helping organizations fill their open positions. The Talent Acquisition Services Blueprint is the second in a series of HfS Workforce Support Services Blueprints reexamining and redefining how organizations are creating operating models and solution portfolios to support today’s workforces. And here is how the providers today shake out, after Christa had put them through the HfS Blueprint mincer:
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So Christa, what exactly are Talent Acquisition Service providers and how do they fit in with the overall research you are doing?
A key principle of my Workforce Support Services research approach is that the traditional HR “hire to retire” process-driven solution approach is completely obsolete in the modern workplace. We can see from the Power to the People research few people are actually planning to stay with their current firm until retirement, and they are struggling to focus on the right work to stay engaged and be productive.
So companies have to think differently about how they identify the right workers, support them in their collaboration and development on a day to day basis, and recognize and reward them in more meaningful ways. The first Blueprint we did was on Rewards, Remuneration and Recognition services, earlier in 2014 which took a new look at global payroll, benefits, and employee contact center providers and how they are moving away from simply processing paychecks to really help keep workers focused on work and appreciative of the support they get from the business.
Then given what HfS saw in terms of both the disengagement in the workplace and this massive workforce exodus upon us, I targeted Talent Acquisition Services next. HfS defines Talent Acquisition Service providers as those third-party firms that support companies in the strategy, sourcing, and engagement programs and processes required to attract and activate workers as businesses desire today.
Talent Acquisition Service delivery is evolving from the traditional recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and contingent or contract work managed service providers (MSP) worlds as companies seek access to more flexible labor pools and talent sourcing and management support models as well.
We know that work is getting done today across an extended enterprise of traditional workers, contract laborers, and third-party service partners, so our new Blueprint explicitly assessed if third-party service firms could support clients across types of labor: staff (traditional full- or part-time employees) and contract (contingent labor).
And to achieve business outcomes of quality of hire, faster time to productivity, or better engagement and retention, these services providers are having to go deeper into traditional talent management areas like workforce strategy and planning, helping clients answer: what is the employer value proposition to potential workers? What makes them productive or retained over time?
This gets into more qualitative issues than simply sourcing and placing workers, so we also looked at capabilities amongst the service providers in terms of how they could support talent strategy and engagement as well.
And what are the important service provider capabilities companies are looking for today?
First, it’s talent. Recruiters who know how to find passive candidates, assessment experts that understand people and organizational psychology, creative communicators who can help identify and amplify a company’s unique employer brand and value proposition, and analytical and proactive account staff that can look across a client’s business as well as network and share with their peers to identify opportunities or challenges and offer suggestions for solutions.
Given the dynamics of hard to find skills and the geographic differences in labor markets, companies are looking for specific talent acquisition focus and sophisticated expertise, including in new technologies.
Second it’s the availability of the technology solutions themselves, particularly social media sourcing and passive talent community development, because firms are no longer simply filling reqs, but supporting the complexities of matching the right people to the right roles at the right time, which is much less of a transaction and more of an on-going supply chain and relationship development set of issues.
Of note, this has meant some early multi-HRO players with administrative transactional models are opting out or just catching up in the Talent Acquisition Services marketplace, while others have successfully doubled down and are being recognized for developing talent strategies and changing outcomes, not just doing support tasks.
Yet new entrants are also emerging specifically to deliver technology-enabled talent acquisition services that support overall talent management objectives like engagement or retention. They don’t even use the term “outsourcing” to describe themselves really, it’s just good service delivery.
So which providers are leading this emerging new Talent Acquisition Services market space?
Companies in the Winners’ Circle were those that have aggressively targeted providing progressive service delivery as we define it and incorporating the use of new sourcing methods and technologies, specifically:
Accenture – seen as a strategic client advisor with technology, global footprint, and C-level trust
Cielo (formerly Pinstripe Ochre House) – a growing global player rising to the top of the talent services “sky”
KellyOCG – leading the industry in adapting acquisition to supply dynamics and methods
TheRightThing! – an early leader in progressive outsourcing being absorbed by ADP
Seven Step – savvy strategy and seamless services stalwart poised for greater success
Neeyamo – a complete human resources outsourcer featuring flexibility and focus
WilsonHCG – a tech-enabled talent acquisition specialist going global
High Performers were AonHewitt, IBM, Peoplescout, and WNS who are clearly going after talent acquisition clients, but have room to develop either in terms of broader strategy and engagement capabilities recognized and used by clients, or across traditional staff and contract labor support, or both.
Of note, we also include 8 short profiles of companies in the traditional recruiting or staffing agency space that appear to be targeting this market, but shy away from official analyst RFIs. These service providers will have to embrace new scrutiny though as they ultimately compete against the breadth of technology-enabled business service providers investing in the talent space.
And what are some of the key take-aways of the study, Christa?
In light of all of the changes and challenges in the modern workforce and workplace, I see talent acquisition today as the tip of the spear to broader workforce transformation. To deliver value beyond cost take out, Talent Acquisition Service providers are now being tasked with partnering with clients to acknowledge – and in many cases address – fundamental workplace and workforce issues beyond simply posting requisitions and screening workers. They are having to deal with the issues that impact quality of hire and company performance through approaches such as culture match and soft skills assessments which completely changes the way a company sees and values talent in many cases.
From competitive pay data benchmarks and labor mapping to identifying employee engagement elements and career development initiatives, the bar is being raised against which the service providers are assessed for their ability to impact the quality of hire. But this also means buyers have to change how they operate and treat people in order to secure and retain the best workers today.
Many of the enterprises I spoke with acknowledged that they are relying on their services partners to both strategically guide as well as tactically support them in on-going talent transformation efforts and it’s going to be a long but ultimately necessary journey – and one they have to take with a third-party to be able to achieve results because they simply don’t have the resources or expertise themselves today.
An interesting aspect of the research you did was to document how fat Talent Acquisition Service providers are along the path to “progressive service delivery”, which we often talk about, can you expand more on this concept?
With the expectations being raised with regard to the business transformation impact from talent acquisition services, more and more buyers say they are collaboratively partnering with service providers who they see as an extension of their own organizations, in many case completely transparent to their candidates and employees.
In this way, talent acquisition buyer/service provider partnerships are exhibiting the acknowledgement and commitment to Workforce Support Service orientations, where they actively work to culturally match the staff on their accounts with the client, find ways to motivate and reward extended teams based on a joint mission to drive business outcomes, and to provide ways they can connect across their organizations and regions as an extended enterprise.
In delivering their services to the marketplace as third-parties specifically sensitive and focused on people and talent, I’d say Talent Acquisition Service providers are leading examples of the characteristics of successful enterprise workforce extension. The service providers in our Winners Circle were recognized for developing an on-going partnership mentality to focus on outcomes not just the “hire” but in securing a well-matched and engaged worker with a positive experience in the business.
Also of note, while a number of long-term traditional outsourcing type contracts were analyzed as a part of this research report, more and more companies are seeking to buy Talent Acquisition Services in shorter contract durations, including project-initiated ways, with an eye to expanding to broader on-going service delivery as their needs dictate – and scaling down when necessary. This was clearly a flexibility that the Winners Circle service providers embraced. They are also very open to having discussions with their partners to add additional capabilities and technologies that ultimately involve new business and pricing models.
With regards to technology, Christa, you’ve called it out as a contentious issue, can you elaborate?
Christa Degnan Manning is SVP, Workforce and Talent Strategies at HfS (Click for bio)
As most early RPO and MSP engagements were tactical and administrative in nature, buyers of services often asked their service providers to use the buyer’s internal enterprise applicant tracking systems (ATS) and contract labor vendor management systems (VMS); others were open to suggestions from their providers or to interact with their proprietary systems if they had to.
Today the market is still split on technologies, some not expecting much beyond what they offer to their service provider staff, others who want new technologies and innovations brought to them part and parcel of the contract. Notably some of the latter are very vocal about who should pay for access to technologies – they say if the service provider team can and should be able to benefit from tech across their customer bases, there should not be separate and equal fees as if they were buying the technologies themselves.
With an accelerating pace of SaaS-based innovation across HR and talent, the use of technology will be a deciding factor in the future success of talent acquisition broadly. I predict the Talent Acquisition Services space will lead a transformation in the SaaS marketplace itself, where SaaS firms negotiate wholesale or volume agreements with service providers so they can help implement and consume the technologies, wrapped by their staff and proprietary service delivery capabilities, and analyze the data that is thrown off and provide advice.
I believe that is the way that enterprises will and should expect to engage with operational capability service providers – not as separate SaaS or outsourcing in and of themselves – in the future. Don’t you?
Christa, thanks for taking the time to share your new research… we look forward to more of your continued coverage of the global workforce in the coming months. HfS readers can click here to view highlights of all our current 15 HfS Blueprint reports.
HfS subscribers click here to access the new report, “Talent Acquisition Service Providers – Partners on the Path to Total Talent Management”
Digital, Digital everywhere and no time to stop and think?
The business world is fundamentally shifting, but do our organizations really need to reinvent their operating models to stay ahead of the curve? Well worry your brain no longer, as we roll out the definitive research study on said topic to understand how today’s enterprise buyers, advisors and providers are approaching Digital Transformation, the current and future expected impact, the technology and business skills that we all need to get the most out of these technologies – and how this changes the game for outsourcing, shared services and global business services strategies.
Please take 15 minutes of your time to complete the study and we will send you an executive report of the findings – and you can enter our prize draw for a Nexus 10:
As always, we sincerely appreciate your time investment to contribute to our research,
Eugene Kublanov, Managing Director for KPMG's Managed Governance Services
Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to interview many of the key characters who have helped develop and shape the global services industry as we know it today.
And one gentleman who has quietly spent many, many hours in executive boardrooms all over the world helping craft some extremely complex – and sometimes very simple – global services management strategies, is the great bald eagle of sourcing himself, Eugene Kublanov.
And when Eugene hasn’t managed to get his family lost somewhere in the wilds of his adopted Arkansas or coaching , he is busily growing and developing one of the industries’ first platform-based managed governance services solutions at KPMG. So, in a long overdue interview, we a delighted to have Eugene with us today to give us his own story…
Phil Fersht, CEO, HfS Research: Good afternoon, Eugene, and thank you very much for taking the time with us today. I think we first met seven or eight years ago, and I seem to remember that you were running a lot of outsourcing engagements and offshoring localization work. Can you talk a bit about your background and how you got into this business?
Eugene Kublanov, Managing Director, Shared Services and Outsourcing Advisory, KPMG: Sure, Phil. Thank you; I appreciate the opportunity to catch up. I started in the outsourcing advisory business in 1999, and that was really through a combination of circumstance and accident. I had spent the early part of my career at a consulting firm advising clients on market entry strategies for the former Soviet Union, living and working in Russia for a good bit of the ’90s.
Then in 1998, when things sort of came crashing down in that part of the world, I went back to school and was recruited by a firm called neoIT. A few years after I joined, the dot-com bust forced the company to rethink its mission and business model. We realized that clients really valued our knowledge and expertise as it related to nontraditional IT providers, locations, cultures, and the mechanics of getting the whole offshoring model to work right. We also realized that the VC community had closed its wallets for the time being. So, we evolved into the first offshoring advisory firm.
I spent nine years at neoIT, the last two as its CEO, and I had the opportunity to work with some very talented professionals who have in their own right taken on leadership positions in the industry today in client companies, advisory firms, and provider organizations. Then in 2009, a good friend and neoIT colleague, Cliff Justice, brought me into KPMG to help launch its Shared Services and Outsourcing Advisory practice.
We grew the practice from a handful of us in 2009 to nearly 1,000 shared services and outsourcing advisory professionals globally. Along the way, we’ve had some great milestones, none more significant than our acquisition of EquaTerra in 2011. Not only did we exponentially grow our ranks, but we also added incredible talent to our mix that has helped us innovate and establish a market leadership position.
Today I lead KPMG’s Managed Governance Services solution, which is a platform technology-enabled service that helps clients be more effective in managing their portfolio of outsourcing providers.
Phil: I remember NeoIT well – it was a smaller advisory boutique . . . very hands on, and you guys were hustling for deals. How did that compare when you went into a big company like KPMG, and how has that been for you?
Eugene: The first thing you realize when you go from a boutique consulting firm to a Big Four is how much risk actually exists in the world. After two weeks of online courses on security, risk management, and independence you realize how much of a tight rope you were walking on before.
After the initial learning period, I began to witness a really interesting phenomenon that I’ve now seen numerous times as new professionals join our practice and the broader firm—a really healthy balance of core KPMG culture and the entrepreneurial spirit you see in boutique firms taking root. It happened with me, it’s happened with our EquaTerra acquisition, and it’s been evident in the numerous acquisitions KPMG has done since I’ve been here.
This blended culture has created an environment where we are learning to move faster and yet we are still very much grounded in managing risk and meeting regulatory requirements. So for me personally, I think it has been a phenomenal learning journey, and one that has made me a more well-rounded professional.
Phil: Talk to me about the governance practice which I know you have now been very intimately involved in growing and building, over the last few years. This must be a very hard concept to sell to clients, convincing them that they need real help externally with managing their relationships and governing their operations. How is that faring?
Eugene: That’s a good question, Phil. It is interesting, in the last five or six years that I have really been focused in the governance area, there has been a noticeable change and shift. There are two types of clients we see today. The first type are The Indoctrinated. These are organizations that really understand the value of effective governance. Their understanding typically comes from past failures to meet business cases, poor customer satisfaction, operational breakdowns, regulatory and internal audit findings, and contracting nightmares. The second type are The Unindoctrinated. These are organizations that have not yet realized the value of effective governance. This may be the result of their early stage in the outsourcing life cycle, a lack of focus, a lack of talent, or a lack of realization that managing the vendor relationship is ultimately the only way to create sustainable value.
Frankly, we have a difficult time convincing The Unindoctrinated to consider our Managed Governance Services solution. Our typical clients realize that effective governance is hard, requires specialized skills, enabling technology, a process orientation, data, and above all, a disciplined approach that spans the term of the vendor relationship. For The Indoctrinated, we have been able to help take their overall outsourcing programs to an entirely new level.
As we look out over the next three to four years, we are really bullish on how we can continue to create value for our clients and build our business. Based on HfS’s projections, the outsourcing industry will continue to grow at a healthy clip reaching over $1 trillion by 2017. Managing the increasing outsourcing scope will need to be a priority for clients to achieve their overall business objectives, and we are well positioned to be the provider of choice.
Phil: Eugene, let’s talk about when clients start to get really interested in governance support services. Is it typically two or three years after a transaction that they really start to struggle to manage the operations effectively, or are you finding the challenges set in sooner in the process? When are you typically bringing new clients on board during the sourcing lifecycle?
Eugene: That is a good question, Phil, and it’s a bit of a scatter-shot in that regard. Everybody from the analyst to advisory community is still working on educating clients on the value of governance. I would say the leading organizations that are progressive and experienced in this area have developed a strong sense of what it takes to be successful at outsourcing and shared services. These organizations are typically beginning to think about governance during their strategy phase and certainly before they source. They have already committed resources to estimates around financials, resourcing, and what it would take to run this model after it is stood up. Unfortunately, I think the majority of clients typically wake up to the need for governance somewhere in the early to mid-transition stages. These are the companies likely doomed for an early renegotiation with their service provider. In the worst case, they wake up to a governance nightmare six to nine months after finishing their transition phase.
Phil: I know your firm has been talking a lot about GBS and integrated service portfolio management. Are you seeing a stronger amount of attraction between what you are trying to drive at MGS and the broader GBS initiatives, or do you think the two still haven’t quite intertwined yet?
Eugene: They are very much intertwined. In fact, as we work with clients on GBS transformations, we apply a model that consists of eight key dimensions and governance is very prominently one of those elements that needs to be in place. Our belief is ultimately that without effective governance, the GBS model begins to break down over time. There have been cases where companies have stood GBS models up, but didn’t put into place the type of governance needed to run it efficiently and effectively, and they have had to essentially backtrack. That becomes a very expensive proposition. We definitely see GBS as the future and a direction that will allow companies to take their first, second, and third generation of outsourcing and shared services initiatives to create the next level of value from those models. To do that, organizations will need to rely on good governance as the bedrock for GBS.
Phil: As you mature your governance capability, does this mean that you might end up as a kind of service provider for clients to help them manage their providers? Is that the big vision here, that you might become the GBS outsourced managed service office for clients?
Eugene: That’s definitely a possibility. Frankly, I think we are well positioned to play that role. As you know, we don’t provide ITO or BPO services, so we have that unique position of being a neutral advisor in the marketplace. We believe that this is the type of position or role that could really make us very effective as part of the governance engine for GBS organizations.
Phil: What do you think about the role of technology to enable these types of services? Do you feel there is a huge amount of potential out there for clients evolving onto new platforms?
Eugene: Yes, we definitely believe that technology enablement of the GBS organization is absolutely essential to getting full value. So whether it is BI and visualization tools used to enable data and analytics, or business process management tools to enable effective rollout and continuous improvement of global processes or service management tools that enable catalogs and fulfillment, getting the technology mix right is key to GBS success.
As we look at the governance area of GBS, this is where our Managed Governance Services solution plays a key role in helping clients address everything from performance to financials to contract to relationship management.
Phil: Thanks, Eugene – it’s been great catching up again, and I am looking forward to sharing this with our readers. You have been a good friend to HfS over the years, and it will be great to finally get you published on the site. Thank you very much for your time today.
Eugene: Thanks, Phil – we love what you guys are doing at HfS and are happy to contribute!
Eugene Kublanov is Managing Director for KPMG’s Managed Governance Services. You can view his bio here.
No industry has been, is currently – and will continue to be – so wholly and fundamentally disrupted by impact of Digital Technologies than retail. And how can retailers survive and prosper in this post-Amazonization world where good ol’ firms like Radioshack and Brookstone are on life-support? How can they constantly stay ahead in an environment where the channels to market are forever blurring, the places to market and advertise are increasingly complex to understand and target, and the supply chain strains to respond to increasingly unpredictable demand signals from ecommerce and social media, in addition to traditional retail channels. Staying ahead of the retail curve is harder than ever, but the rewards are also potentially much greater for those which uncover new market channels and make sense of the proliferation of available data. In order to extract some sense from this intricate market, HfS analyst Reetika Joshi set about developing a Blueprint analysis on the space…
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Reetika, how did this market evolve and what is driving buyer interest in Retail Operations today?
The retail operations marketplace has evolved over the last decade in an opportunistic manner. Buyer demand has primarily addressed traditional IT services and horizontal BPO needs (including customer service, finance & accounting and human resources outsourcing). In the last five years, buyers and service providers have also started to venture into outsourcing retail-unique processes to a limited extent. These include service support for areas such as storefront operations, merchandizing and replenishment, ecommerce channel support (content, web development and customer service) and supply chain processes. Buyer interest in these core services support area is being driven by four key imperatives for global retailers today:
Cost Reduction – Reducing cost and creating process standardization in a low margin business, especially for large retailers
Surviving the ‘Amazonization’ of retail – Digital retail and developing a progressive digital roadmap (strategy and execution) that aligns ecommerce and brick and mortar operations. This includes not only the integration from an inventory management standpoint, but elements that affect customers that outsourcing can address, such as cross channel pricing and promotion and merchandizing opportunities.
Creating a future-proof supply chain – Bringing visibility in supply chain operations, streamlining inefficiencies across geographies and units, improving forecasting and time to market. As supply chain management (SCM) becomes more complex, there is more of a need for proactive monitoring and reporting and dashboarding, customer impact visibility, cost, etc. This creates a demand related to SCM particularly in the analytics space.
Elevating the consumer experience – Winning and retaining loyalty of fickle consumers, increasingly the ‘digital natives’ with their heightened expectations for same day deliveries, real time promotions and personalized in-store engagement. This is the most direct opportunity for service providers to pitch next-gen outsourcing services in omni-channel support, as retail has more consumer facing operations than back-office operations thus far.
To address this sea shift in retailers’ business models, service providers have had to go beyond services typically classifiable as ‘BPO’. We see buyer interest develop in areas that have more consultative and technological components along with service support. E.g. consulting/re-engineering services to help optimize supply chains, spend management or formulate digital roadmaps. To add to this mix, service providers have started to push technology-led solutions including point-solution toolkits, analytics products and platforms alongside services support.
And how did the Blueprint analysis turn out?
Reetika Joshi is HfS Research Director, Industry BPO and Analytics Strategies (click for bio)
Overall, the clusters of companies in this Blueprint analysis are hedged somewhere in the middle of our map, reflecting the relative nascency of this market and its future potential. The Winner’s Circle service providers represent a diverse mix of origins, approaches and strategies for servicing the retail market. Cognizant, with a robust retail consulting and ecommerce practice, brings thought leadership, an array of retail-specific technology enablers and focus on digital support. Sitel has customer experience management expertise and a collaborative approach towards driving global best practices in retail customer engagement. TCS demonstrated technology expertise and along with its acquired captive retail assets, it brings ecommerce thought leadership to an expansive retail clientele.
Similarly, the High Performers in this study also represent a mix of multi-dimensional strengths. Infosys, Wipro and Tech Mahindra are continuing to expand their range of work with retail clients beyond IT services and are making the most investments in retail analytics and select core process support such as storefront operations and supply chain management. Concentrix, Sutherland and WNS are looking to leverage their analytics capabilities and customer experience management presence in retail to add new logos and update solution sets through new technology enablers (automation, social tools, etc.)
So what are your key takeaways from this study and what should we be watching for in next few years in retail operations?
We believe the retail operations market is set for rapid growth in the next 3 years. This will be largely driven by the impact of digital requirements for retailers which will lead them to look for more and more external support. On the service provider side, this is an interesting space to watch because as a relatively new market, these companies can really build differentiated services portfolios by strategically alinging to what we call ‘progressive operations’. As discussed above, buyer needs goes beyond traditional ‘BPO’ delivery, and as service providers carve out their solutions in this space, they have the opportunity to invest in comprehensive analytics led service delivery, process transformation (especially for supply chain and ecommerce engagements), collaborative partnerships and investments with retail clients that bring together modern technology components to impact business outcomes. Some other observations we made around this market are outlined below:
The ‘vertical’ retail story has a long way to go. Over the years, service providers have developed significant relationships with global retailers through IT services or horizontal BPO services. While they may have verticalized their businesses to align with client industries, we do not see the same level of maturity in well-thought out retail value chain services support as with other verticals such as banking and insurance. Industry alignment will help service providers bring domain experience to effect core industry outcomes across IT services, business processes and consulting for retailers, but only in the medium-long term.
Digital proliferation is placing new demands on managing the customer experience. Retailers are looking to service providers most notably to help them address changing customer channel preferences, ecommerce and brick and mortar integration and the nuances of digital marketing. With this study, we saw the most demonstrated capabilities of innovation from these three areas. Service providers are aggressively trying to differentiate their CEM offerings by weaving in technologies that address digital (e.g. gaining a single view of customers, social media monitoring and promotions). Some service providers are starting to productize their offerings such as omni-channel customer analytics recommendations engines, monitoring tools, etc. Success here will hinge on the ability of a service provider to integrate insights back into campaign strategies, provide consultative marketing support, and ultimately transform traditional CEM processes to align with its retail clients’ digital roadmaps.
Multiple delivery models developing to cater to the seasonal variability of retail demand. Retailers have the highest demand variability among industries for customer engagement management (CEM) services,creating staffing, retention and quality issues over the years. We are seeing certain service providers try and address this with alternate delivery models that have been appreciated by clients in our study. Examples include relying on a much higher percentage of work-from-home agents that are retained long term, and leveraging part time university talent pools in nearshore destinations. The challenge of seasonality is not going to go away and cracking the code on it has the potential to impact revenues at peak times – making retailers particularly amenable to working with innovative service providers in this area.
Consolidating technology investments across the retail value chain. During our analysis, we observed multiple examples of service providers opportunistically funding/co-investing/piloting technology investments with retail clients. Some of these have resulted in productized offerings in the last couple of years, such as cloud based trade promotions management applications, analytics platforms for ecommerce revenue optimization and supply chain visibility. This approach can be helpful for establishing the business case for certain emerging technologies (e.g. in-store iBeacon mobile technology applicability). However, service providers must craft and more importantly, communicate a well thought out strategy for impacting the retail value chain through technology beyond these siloed projects. What this market doesn’t need is a wide variety of client specific solutions that lack ongoing investment and roadmaps, instead we need to move to more consistent business platforms that span across clients. This will call for service providers to actively enable their non-competitive retail clients to collaborate and contribute towards new solution development and a wider understanding of existing core service capabilities, where applicable.
Reetika, thanks for taking the time to share you new research and insight into the retails operations services market… we look forward to more of your coverage on this space in the coming months.
HfS subscribers click here to access the new report, ’HfS Blueprint Report: Retail Operations’
We woke up this morning to a wonderful endorsement from the mighty Gartner for all the hard work the HfS team has been putting into developing our HfS Blueprints over the last couple of years, when we proudly launched our revolutionary HfS Blueprint crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers. Yes indeed folks – Gartner has announced it is doing its own “Blueprints research”!
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Since we released the first Blueprint Report almost 18 months’ ago, the HfS Blueprint has become one of the industry’s best known and most popular methodologies for assessing provider capability and competitive market landscapes, with fourteen Blueprint reports now published (you can view all the HfS Blueprint highlights here). Enterprise buyers have used the Blueprint Reports exhaustively as an assessment guide for their provider portfolio management, and many advisors rely on it to sanitize their own provider selection processes with their clients.
So does this mean Gartner will take onboard the key tenets of the HfS methodology, in addition to leveraging the broad community data we gather from 1000’s of industry constituents, when it develops its own “Blueprints”? Let’s recap how we develop and execute on the HfS Blueprint methodology – and you can make up your own mind whether you think Gartner will deviate away from its Magic Quadrant process for assessing tech suppliers:
The Tenets and Objectives of the HfS Blueprint:
To assess services providers without being reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst;
Provide a credible methodology (see here) to gauge the performance of service providers against “real” innovation and execution capabilities;
Deliver a performance assessment of providers that apportions importance weightings of each innovation and execution category based on data from our annual State of Outsourcing Survey, conducted with the support of KPMG, covering 1200 enterprise buyers, influencers, advisors and provider executives each year;
Evaluate performance assessments of providers where exhaustive inputs from buyers and influencers shape the scoring (not solely a handful of rose-tinted client references that the providers served up themselves);
Enable a customizable assessment tool where enterprise buyers re-calibrate the weightings to assess their provider-fit based on their own unique needs.
Good luck Gartner – we can’t wait to see these new Blueprints of yours’ hit the market!
We have heard a lot about Apple’s manufacturing outsourcing, where the firm has ~500,000 people subcontracted via Foxconn in China to crank out its iPhones, but very little about its IT outsourcing habits.
So… does Apple also leverage large scale IT outsourcing? If answer is yes, then what kind of IT outsourcing is done by Apple, and how it has been changing with time?
With these questions in mind, our ever-curious India-based analyst (note: also keen novelist now seemingly developing a penchant for investigative journalism), Pareekh Jain, started studying Apple’s IT outsourcing initiatives, and the results surprised us: Apple doesn’t outsource its core software technologies that go into its products, but it does outsource Enterprise Applications, Business Intelligence, ADM and other software initiatives to a combination of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, TechMahindra and Exilant (which we know of). Quite simply, as Apple is growing, so is the scope of its Indian-centric IT outsourcing to support it’s ever-increasing needs.
Another related aspect that cropped up during Pareekh’s research, is the increasing use of global engineering talent by Apple. According to our estimates, Apple leverages Indian engineering talent heavily as indicated from its sizable H1B and GreenCard applications.
We shared our research findings with Times Of India (The World’s largest English daily newspaper), which went as far as a story on this interesting little topic on today’s front page.
We’ll be sharing our research report on Apple’s outsourcing strategy with our readers shortly….
2014 has shaped up to be the year Digital Transformation took root as a unifying theme for IT and business services. What’s been exciting about Digital is much of the technology is already available, and it’s the digitization of business processes to enable plug-and-play services, more meaningful data and more seamless business models designed for mobile and cloud business environments.
Digital is not really about digitizing the way we’ve always done things, it’s about digitizing the way things need to be done to be more competitive and effective in the future. Digital is also about progressing our talent to operate with digital mindsets, by adopting analytical, creative approaches to help their enterprises progress from creaking, legacy business practices.
Nearly every major IT and business services provider is now using the term Digital in its go-to-market messaging today. But that level of activity and interest means the phrase has taken on an extraordinary breadth of meaning. So much so, perhaps, that one might argue it is becoming increasingly meaningless as a descriptor of activity.
HfS’ Ned May recently set out to clarify our definition of Digital Transformation and to explore the positioning of the leading IT and business services providers in the today. Rather than narrowly define and coral the topic, he cast a wide net with the goal of highlighting the full range of activity currently underway. His rationale for this approach being that Digital Transformation does not merely represent a new external market opportunity for service providers, but it is also a major catalyst to reconfigure the very markets in which they are operating.
To this end, we have published what we are calling a Blueprint Primer Report that evaluates this emerging Digital Transformation services landscape, the significant participants and their early positioning and achievements as they vie to take many of their clients into this digital dimension of service delivery and capability. So how did the early front runners shake out?
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Ned, let’s start with what you mean by Digital Transformation. Can you elaborate?
Thanks, Phil. As you are aware, it can mean many things but in its purest sense we see Digital Transformation as the changes that must occur when a business moves away from a physical task. For example, the shifts that occur in underlying processes and infrastructure when one sells goods online rather than in physical store. As such, you could argue that Digital Transformation is as old as information technology itself.
So… why, suddenly, is “Digital” as a moniker beginning to stick again?
Ah, good point and to quote Yogi Berra, its Deja vu all over again. But there’s good reason. We are entering another period of accelerated development and economic advancement that is being driven by technology. The last wave was also fueled by Digital technology, but driven by the web and the broader internet the gains this created were primarily centered on improving existing operations. Information became cheaper, moved faster and became available to nearly everyone – whether an employee, customer or partner. That transparency drove out waste. Today, we are seeing another wave of Digital, however this time it is different. It is fueled by a cross pollinating collision of three things: the proliferation of mobile devices, the development of sophisticated analytics, and the emergence and maturing of cloud delivery. In short, computing is now spreading out to the edges of every activity we undertake and in conjunction we are now able to glean meaningful and actionable insight from this activities at reasonable cost. None of this is new. It’s been the subject of visionaries for years. What is transformative today is that it is increasingly economically feasible. As such, leading enterprises are adopting these technologies to drive business gains, and laggards are realizing they must either keep up or they may be forever left behind.
You mention in your research that Digital Transformation is already here today. Where do you see this activity?
Yes, and I can not say it enough. The future is not waiting for tomorrow. It is here today and we have been documenting it over the past year in our research and for those hoping to reference some definitive turning point, you are waiting in vain.
So… what then does Digital Transformation actually look like?
Digital Transformation is as much about the impact on providers themselves as it is about the needs of the markets they serve. Specifically, it brings five key changes to the provider market – changes we highlight in our ongoing research. The five traits are:
New business models emerge. As IT service providers look to push a message of transformation, they are being asked (or afforded) the opportunity to embrace this themselves. As a result, we are seeing a rise in revenue gainsharing models where a provider delivers a set of underlying services in exchange for a share of profits pegged to a specific business outcome.
Bottom line: Digital Transformation will rewrite the underlying economics for services firms.
Sacred operating models get shattered. When a new market emerges it does so via a set of new definitions that establishes its uniqueness and allows it to take shape. These “rules” often take on significance of their own but as the market evolves into a mainstream opportunity, these rigid definitional distinctions ultimately become obstacles not advantages. Such is the case today with Cloud, Analytics, and Mobility. The core concepts matter but greater value is obtained by taking a broad and open approach to the enabling technologies and what they can bring.
Bottom line: Digital Transformation will become embedded in every conversation
A focus on infrastructure readiness prevails. As providers push their messaging around the positive outcomes that digital transformation can bring, they are being asked to rationalize disparate legacy apps to enable this change. This raises the focus on solving the challenge of infrastructure readiness and who can best weave it all together.
Bottom line: Digital Transformation requires us to fix many of our old problems before we can realize its promise.
Old technologies become new friends. As new markets emerge, they often revolve around shiny new features that ultimately cloud our ability to extrapolate where they are truly headed overall. True progress comes when we move beyond this feature focus to embrace the whole. Take for instance the mobile market where early on we saw smartphone Apps become the end rather than the means. Today leading services providers are thinking well beyond this and presenting Digital Transformation offerings that leverage the full capabilities of these phones and integrate them into how a business is run not just how some information is accessed or displayed.
Bottom line: Digital Transformation requires us to look beyond the obvious in what new technologies offer.
Old friends become new technologies. In a similar fashion, Digital Transformation creates opportunities for new forms of information and insight to be gleaned from the traditional ways we already conduct business today. For example, email trails are being mined via sophisticated analytics to determine patterns of communication that may indicate future problems among partners. Sensors are now being deployed on physical objects to allow them to become part of information context that was impossible before.
Bottom line: Digital transformation requires us to look for new insight among existing processes and tools.
Despite the current activity being well underway, it is important to point out we remain in the earliest of stages for this market and the battle for dominance continues to play out – both across the underlying enabling technologies as well as the providers themselves.
After all, the iPhone – arguably one of the single greatest drivers of this opportunity – is only seven years old. These markets are moving fast and there is a tremendous amount at stake for every participant – be they hardware, software, services or some combination of all three. Expect the activity to intensify.
So with that, how do the providers stack up?
Digital Transformation represents a diverse set of activities – everything from modernizing a back office legacy application to designing a new customer engagement model to be delivered via a mobile app with many disparate services in between. As such, conducting an apples-to-apples comparison across providers requires a high level view that compares outcomes rather than individual underlying technologies.
In the realm of Digital Transformation, HfS groups IT Services providers in one of three circles as determined by the maturity of their offerings and capabilities within this emerging market.
Front Runners. Accenture, IBM, TCS, Cognizant and Infosys occupy the select group of “Front Runners” as each has demonstrated having the industry expertise and technological innovation to craft leading edge solutions across a variety of clients. These providers make a great fit for those looking to aggressively embrace change – understanding the level of challenges and opportunities that breaking this new ground will entail.
Challengers. Wipro, HP, Capgemini, and Unisys are this year’s “Challengers” with each in the hunt for the top positions though they could all benefit from greater coordination and centralization around their entire portfolio of Digital skills. These providers make a great fit for an enterprise that brings a clear but more measured vision of adoption.
Rising Stars. IGATE and CSC round out this year’s “Rising Stars” with each providing strong examples of Digital Transformation though now needing to do so on much broader scale. Providers in this wave make an excellent choice for those looking to experiment and want a strong partner to co-develop a solution.
In your view, how should a business or technology executive should approach Digital today?
First and foremost, there is the need to assess your organizational appetite for change. As the most significant new selling opportunity of a decade if not more, Digital Transformation is generating tremendous buzz across the IT Services landscape. Nearly every major provider is aggressively marketing themselves as a leader in the field today.
So what is a buyer to do? Enterprises are advised to assess their internal appetite for change. If you are still at the experimental phase and only looking to test the waters of Digital, a skilled partner from the lower left might be willing to invest more energy getting you where you want to go in return for becoming a reference account. However, if you are in a market or industry that needs to quickly go all in, you may be better off with a front runner today.
Also understand that some firms excel at execution while others excel at innovation and these relative strengths can differ within an individual provider’s own big MAC. We include a diagram highlighting these distinctions for every provider in the report. For example, one portrays a firm that is strongest in mobile innovation and brings balanced strengths in Analytics but lags a bit around innovation in Cloud. Enterprise buyers should use these diagrams to match a provider’s strengths with the skills they need.
And finally, where do you see Digital Transformation headed in the second half of 2014 and beyond?
Ned May, SVP Enterprise Mobility and Digital Services Research, HfS (Click for Bio)
While the upside around Digital Transformation is significant, and providers should and are addressing it now, it still remains in dollar terms fairly nascent today. The same is true for many of the technology deployments. So while new business models are visible and new revenue streams being realized, they remain far from the norm.
However, the market is moving fast. Given the amount of focus and energy invested around Digital Transformation in the first half of 2014, we expect rapid development in the second half of 2014 and even more so in 2015. Buyers could even expect a bidding war among providers as the hunt for reference able wins gets frothy short term
While a flurry of buzz words will continue to flow around this space in 2014 and beyond with the likes of Systems of Engagement and the Internet of Things both gaining ground, the bulk of activity for services providers will continue to center around three activities.
Developing their own proprietary platforms
Refining and honing their skills at Services Integration
Adding a few major reference transformation projects.
As this occurs, deep industry expertise as well as analytics skills will become increasingly in demand. So too will be the need to form actionable partnerships with other services providers and to organize oneself to market and sell in more efficient ways as multiyear infrastructure and process deals get squeezed out by ongoing collaborations measured by business results.
Ned, thanks for taking the time to describe the Digital Transformation Services market… we look forward to more continued coverage on this evolving market in the coming months.
HfS subscribers click here to access our new report, ‘2014 Digital Transformation Services: an HfS Blueprint Primer’
It’s time to wake up and smell the roses, people. The services industry is going through its most seismic challenge as increasingly sophisticated enterprise clients are looking to reduce their reliance on labor-based services and clunking archaic on-premise technology. While some services and consulting firms have their heads buried in the sand, clearly in denial that the services model has already entered into a fundamental shift, others are recognizing that they need to get ahead of this – and fast.
The services industry is going through a secular change and it will never be like it was, where trillions of dollars were spent maintaining dysfunctional systems and funding huge armies of staff to fumble their way through managing non-standard and often obsolete processes. Those days are fading fast and that pie is shrinking for providers and consultants still feeding off the legacy enterprise operations beast.
We ran a study earlier this year that explored the role of technology when enterprises outsource their business operations, and the findings from almost 200 major enterprises couldn’t be clearer: half of today’s enterprises are expecting to take the leap to enable their business operations with new technology tools and platforms in barely a two-year time-frame.
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Operations leaders don’t have the luxury of ten-year improvement programs anymore – corporate leadership expects to see tangible results in much shorter timeframes. You only have to look at the growing number of unemployed CIOs to understand what happens when functions become overly-operational and limited value and innovation is achieved.
It’s the same for CFOs, CPOs, supply chain heads and other function leaders – most are under a renewed pressure to continue driving out costs, while delivering ongoing improvements to data quality and having greater alignment with front-office activities. The old “we need to fix our ERP first” excuse just isn’t cutting it as much these days.
This is why 49% of today’s enterprise buyers expect to move to a “wide-scale transformation of business processes enabled by new technology tools/platforms” in just two years. Yes, this may be a pipe-dream for some enterprises, but what’s clear is that many of those operations leaders failing to steer their enterprise away from legacy delivery models will get cast aside quickly in today’s tolerance-diminishing business environment.
Why the merger of Operations, Infrastructure and Cloud services helps address the fundamental shift to technology-driven services
One recent provider re-organization that quietly took place was the merger (see link) of Accenture’s Operations with its its infrastructure and cloud services division to create a ~$5.7 Billion (HfS estimate) business unit. This follows on from the firm’s recent renaming of “BPO” to “Operations”, where the intent was always to extend the service suite. Now this is significant.
Firstly, these are two very large divisions, so it will likely take some time for them to figure out how to work most effectively together, but the immediate benefits are already powerful:
Creating hybrid teams of cloud and process experts creates an “As-a-Service” culture
When you talk to buyers today, most will tell you that having to deal with the technology and operations/BPO divisions of providers is akin to dealing with two separate companies. There is often very little synergy – and very different working cultures – between those people which deliver business processes and those who design, develop and maintain technology solutions. It’s been a major impediment to the progression of the BPO industry, and one of the key reasons why 49% of enterprises today (see above) still find themselves trapped in a “lift and shift” purgatory. Having IT infrastructure and operational talent together should help to break down these barriers and create a culture of enabling technology-driven services, moving processes into an “As-a-Service” model and creating the skills and acumen that providers need to make the delivery of “As-a-Service” effective. Simply put, BPaaS (Business-Process-as-a-Service) delivery is not as dependent on transactional processing scale, as most these processes are now full automated in the cloud; instead the successful providers will develop their BPaaS businesses around providing teams of analytical, creative and digitally-centric talent – areas where most enterprises already recognize they have real talent shortages.
The “Cloud Conversation” can be quickly brought to the table with operational clients
Ambitious and sophisticated clients are now seeing the huge benefits of shifting from on-premise to cloud delivery and need to talk to combinations of infrastructure and operational experts to understand what is possible, and to craft solutions that can work for them. And this isn’t something that is occurring in a few years, it’s alreadyhappening where our latest research shows close to one-in-three enterprises already using (or about to use) BPaaS / cloud as an alternative to legacy outsourcing in areas such as HR, industry-specific operations, finance and accounting and procurement:
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For example, many enterprises have already taken the leap to Workday, but some failed to invest in the right services expertise, not only to implement the product, but to go through the requisite change management and organizational redesign needed to get the maximum benefit from the cloud solution. It’s already clear from the Workday example alone that outsourcing and cloud need to be delivered as one seamlessly-accessible service, where outsourcing is technology. Most enterprises adopting cloud products and expecting simply to “figure out” how to enable the operations around them are going to go through a lot more pain and long-term frustration that they ever anticipated.
To this end, having a provider which understands and can implement a cloud platform, support the transformation and provide the necessary services that add real value to the front-office is the Holy Grail for many buyers. For Accenture, having both these breeds of experts working even more closely together will surely help drive forward these types of conversations even faster, but with an eye on both the cloud benefits and the services acumen to implement and services cloud solutions effectively. This should be of particular benefit to areas where Accenture has been making discreet software investments that support major service areas, such as Accenture Credit Services’ mortgage origination platform and its Octagon clinical services management platform.
Creates more opportunities to make investments and future alliances in the As-a-Service delivery model
Mike Salvino is Group Chief Executive, Accenture Operations
Rolling out a comprehensive As-a-Service delivery model across the sheer breadth of vertical and horizontal areas in which a global provider such as Accenture operates, is going to take major investments in future software platforms (whether developed in-house or acquired), strategic alliances with software firms and niche specialists, and ongoing investments in training and reorientation of its own services talent to provide higher value services for clients.
When providers section-off process delivery and operations from technology, it nearly always makes it challenging to get the right access to funds, align all the stakeholders that matter, and make meaningful, credible business cases. Quite simply, operations people talk a different language to technology people. Having operations and infrastructure in the same unit creates more opportunity for transformational thinking at the solution-architect level in operations, by increasing awareness of – and exposure to – emerging technologies. In addition, having a group head in Mike Salvino (pictured), who comes from a business operations mindset with a focus on business solutions, should help focus the new division on service delivery aligned to solving business needs, as opposed to merely technology products.
The Bottom-line: The winning providers will be those with one foot in the present and one in the future
Providers which leave their current clients trapped in a status quo of averageness, will be the losers in this new era of services. The table-stakes of services have shifted rapidly in just a few short years, where ambitious clients are now expecting providers to come to the table with the ability to transform their operations and add real capability in areas that are much more “front-office” focused. There are also a large number of clients (at least half, according to our research mentioned earlier) who are still at a phase where they haven’t yet really changed anything – they still run the same old processes the same old way and are clearly challenged to incorporate the benefits of cloud delivery and digital into their operations. If these clients’ providers cannot bring the new world of As-a-Service process delivery to the table, many will walk from their incumbents – and there have already been some notable defections this year from clients, clearly fed up with the paralysis of their current provider to deliver anything more than the same old processing and very little capability (or impetus) to improve them. Simply-put, it’s not in some providers’ interests to help their clients change the status quo – often there isn’t enough money in it for them, or they just don’t have the caliber resources to help them.
Providers prepared to be bold and get ahead of the curve – and make the necessary investments do to so – will survive. It’s still early days, and providers like Accenture can’t yet declare victory, simply because it recognizes the seeds of change and is actually doing something about it. And several other savvy providers clearly sense what the future has in store, and are making their own beds in preparation. However, the shift to the As-a-Service era has already begun and there are going to be many painful experiences as cash-rich legacy engagements are ejected and several providers disappear into the tier of insignificance, or are broken up and submerged into other entities altogether. The winners are those which can bring together higher-value service capability that inspires creative and analytical thinking, and twin them with real cloud delivery – either through their own platforms, or those of their partners.
The services world has already started to change – and those who are only just realizing may already be too late…
Ned May, SVP Enterprise Mobility and Digital Services Research, HfS
Remember the days when standard corporate issue to enterprise staff was the monster-sized Dell laptop that only seemed to be made for the mass-market corporate crowd and needed a huge ugly Targus case to lug it around… and a low-end Blackberry, where the only redeeming feature was brickbreaker that could keep your brain amused for hours on those middle seats at the back of coach?
In fact, it was for these very reasons that executives slowly came around to realizing that the only cool technology they could get access to would come from their own personal investments, which is how Apple crept into the executive suite. Apple was just so anti-enterprise; YOU were in control and YOU could develop you whole digital persona using your iPad and iPhone.
There have been some insightful pieces penned on the landmark IBM/Apple alliance signed this week – notably from Larry Dignan and Peter Allen that go into the far-reaching potential consequences of this deal, notably the potential of providing iOS apps and embedded analytics tools to enterprises and disrupting traditional services models, potentially not too different from Workday’s impact on HR.
However, I wanted to draw your attention to HfS’ enterprise mobility analyst, Ned May, who focused on the simple fact that this alliance finally gets Apple into the enterprise through the front door…
“Apple has never understood the enterprise very well. While it has attempted to become ‘more friendly’ over the years and extended a few fig leafs in the terms of iOS updates that address enterprise grade concerns like security, Apple’s success in the enterprise has mostly been driven by its success as a consumer device. It has largely entered the enterprise through the front door in an executive’s purse or pocket not via a box on the loading dock that was backed up to IT. Further, Apple has been notoriously difficult to work with often to the frustration of a CIO. In short, while Apple’s support might be “legendary” it has not been the type of story that ends with someone riding off into the sunset. Which brings us back to the impetus behind this deal. At its core, it is about Apple realizing it will never understand the enterprise and that there is no better partner to get them over that challenge than IBM.
“In exchange, IBM gets to offer a message of safety to anxious IT departments who nervously watched iOS devices sweep into their formerly locked down playgrounds and ultimately opened them up to the chaos known as BYOD. As we pointed out in our Enterprise Mobility Services Blueprint (see link), the market is now reaching a stage of maturity where IT departments are being asked to rationalize the disparate mobile activities underway around the enterprise. As they do, many are looking to apply their traditional approaches to managing the challenges these new environments brings.”
Click here to access the full complimentary POV “The Day Apple’s Enterprise Strategy Came in from the Cold”
When we look at the future potential of BPO, one of the markets with the most untapped potential is that of supply chain services, which could be as large as $300 Billion in annual expenditure when today’s emerging offerings really begin to mature, and an increasing number of buyers have to tap into third party technology and services specialization.
When you think about the scope of this space, we’re talking about the management of orders, inventory, manufacturing and transport to get products to market, and then the whole additional services tied to after market needs, master data management and sustainability management:
The need for supply chain process, domain and analytics expertise, supported by the necessary technology tools platforms – at a global scale and depth – has never been as intense it today’s buoyant and globalized market place, where decisions needs to made faster than ever to keep many companies in business. So HfS analysts Pareekh Jain and Charles Sutherland set about the analyst industry’s first-ever attempt to flesh out the leading providers in this market with the 2014 Blueprint Report in Supply Chain Management BPO Services:
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So, Charles and Pareekh, what is driving buyer interest in Supply Chain Management BPO today?
For most enterprises the costs of goods sold is the vast majority of their income statement and the with SG&A having in many cases being squeezed extensively over the last decade they are looking for new ways to both reduce COGS but also to improve performance of their supply chains as well. As the world continues to globalize and both suppliers and customers become more distributed and more demanding it is strategically critical that enterprises rethink how they are managing these supply chains.
It’s taken quite awhile for the message to get out to the broader market that there are a variety of different SCM BPO service providers today who all have valuable offerings to help with the enterprise supply chain but we see that market knowledge and understanding is taking hold. There are so many pain points for both multinational corporations and domestic SMBs in their supply chains including the lack of end to end visibility, lack of standardization in processes, rampant inefficiency in transactional processing, shortcoming in the scale of operations as well as the lack of resilience in their globally dispersed supply chain that when SCM BPO comes along and offers solutions to many or all of these it certainly helps create the level of increasing buyer interest that we are seeing today.
How would you categorize the current state of this market?
We would say that the SCM BPO market has two is defined by two key and in some ways conflicting traits. On one hand it is a very nascent market where the potential for impact in the enterprise and for revenue for Service Providers has barely been scratched. On the other hand, SCM BPO is one of the most advanced of all the BPO offerings in the market as it can combine business outcomes based contracting, deep analytics in delivery, collaborative partnership based solutions, large scale process transformation and the use of significant technology components as well. In fact we see SCM BPO as one of the best examples in practice of what we have been calling “progressive operations”. It really can be leading edge service delivery but as we said it’s still a small market, with relatively few RFPs and minimal involvement of sourcing advisors. Once it gets better known and the case studies from clients get more attention we believe that this is a market which will really take off in the next few years.
And how did the Winners Circle shake out?
There are four service providers in our SCM BPO Winner’s Circle: Accenture, Capgemini, Entercoms & HAVI Global Solutions. We found four things in common across these service providers:
– Strong consulting and analytics capabilities;
– The deployment of visibility or Control Tower platforms;
– Great account management capabilities as validated by clients; and
– Deep reference examples of clients who have been through a journey of SCM transformation together with these service providers that they couldn’t have done on their own.
So what are your key takeaways from this study?
We think there are four key take aways from this Blueprint study on SCM BPO. First, is the uniqueness of SCM BPO by comparison to other horizontal BPOs. Second, it is about the market potential and relevance across industries of SCM BPO. Third, is the current heterogeneity of capabilities and strategies across the SCM BPO service providers profiled. Finally, it is about the capabilities required to be successful in the SCM BPO market today.
Lets discuss each of them separately:
1) The SCM BPO market is unique as it impacts COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) while the other horizontal BPOs primarily impact SG&A. In SCM BPO, there is competition not only from the other SCM BPO service providers but also from diverse set of providers such as IT Firms, software firms, consulting companies, 3rd party logistic (3PL) firms, firms with integrated supply chains, reverse logistics and/or firms willing to carry inventory costs and infrastructure. In this mixed environment, it is the role of the SCM BPO providers to better defined the client problems and possible outcomes and then bring together an ecosystem of all these various components to create the solution. As a result, partnerships and partner management is of greater importance in this area of BPO than pretty much anywhere else we have looked. What also makes SCM BPO unique is that having a distributed geographic delivery footprint is not just about cost savings or follow the sun processing but a key part of delivering what in many cases are still very physical and localized processes.
2) Since SCM BPO directly impacts COGS it means that the potential addressable size of this market is even at conservative estimates huge, on the order of about $3 Trillion with a related process cost of say $300 Billion annually. Based on our current estimates of the market, BPO Service Providers are delivering perhaps $1.5 Billion in services so around 0.5% of total potential just in BPO and 0.05% of enterprise related cost.
3) Amongst the service providers we have profiled we see four different segment which creates this heterogeneity in approaches to the market. We see there being: consulting solution based service providers, specialist service providers, pure play BPO service providers and large IT services companies. Even within these segments we see significantly different areas of focus by service provider and strategies which at this nascent state of the market are unique to each. Therefore as a potential buyer of SCM BPO services, it is incumbent on you to look at all these different approaches and talk to the service providers to understand their vision for the processes and capabilities as this isn’t a market where you will see near identical bids across a range of service providers in response to any RFIs/RFPs you release.
4) If we have to pick one essential capability required to be successful in the SCM BPO market today it will be the availability of analytic based consulting capabilities on top of transactional service offerings. All of the service providers in our Winner’s Circle have these capabilities. It is because of the collaborative, analytic based business outcomes oriented model for SCM BPO that we really see this as one of the clearest expressions of what we have termed at HfS as “progressive operations”. SCM BPO really can be one of the offerings that sets the path for the other parts of the BPO marketplace to follow.
What are some trends you are seeing in SCM BPO offerings and what should we be watching for in next few years?
The biggest trend is SCM BPO service providers acting as collectors and commentators on the vast variety and volume of supply chain related data that is being created. BPO Service Providers are using this data in two different ways today. First, they are using the data in near real-time to identify weak links or problem areas in the supply chain by implementing visibility platforms, dashboards and Control Towers and wrapping those with insightful analytical teams. Second, they are using the data with consulting and process excellence teams on a project basis to drive better decision making outside of the real-time interactions.
Going forward we should be watching for even more rapid growth in the volume and variety of this data as it gets fed by even larger and more detailed streams from telematics, machine to machine interactions (M2M) the internet of things(IoT) and by social media commentary from users of the products in the supply chain. SCM BPO can be a capability to not just analyze the data and drive better discrete decision making in the process but as it integrates with product development, it can be at the intersection of value creation as we bring together the product development cycle with insight from product performance in the field, reliability data and insight from the operation of after market services processes. This is one dynamic area and we want to show how this is evolving by also looking at the inter-related engineering services market later in 2014.
Over the next few years, we believe that SCM BPO will be one of the fastest growing and ultimately largest markets in BPO and as that happens and more service providers develop their offerings in this space we should expect to see a lot more M&A activity as the race to scale and differentiated capabilities takes root.
Thanks for taking the time to learn more about SCM BPO and we look forward to more of our continued coverage on this evolving market in the coming months.
HfS report authors Charles Sutherland (left) and Pareekh Jain (Click to view bios)
HfS subscribers can click here to download their copy of the 2014 Supply Chain Management BPO Services Blueprint Report
