THE business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the country aims to earn $13 billion in revenues and generate one million jobs by 2010.

If this will be achieved, this would mean a total of $6.7 billion in annual salaries that can be distributed through spending in various sectors of the country’s economy, said lawyer Jamea Garcia, executive director for talent development of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP).

Garcia was in Cebu last Tuesday as one of the panelists during the business forum hosted by JobsDB.com at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel.

Cebu, said Garcia, is known as the second biggest home of BPO companies, after Metro Manila. She said that as of BPAP’s last count, BPO companies in Cebu employ a total of 16,400 workers.

Based on data from BPAP, 30 percent of the projected combined annual salaries for 2010 would be spent on food while 10 percent will go to housing-related expenses, and five percent for transportation and communication. BPAP also said 20 percent will go to taxes and the rest would go to other expenditures.

“Achievable”

Garcia said the targeted revenue in the next two years is “achievable,” considering the 50 percent growth in the BPO industry in the last three years. BPAP has laid out a roadmap that will help the industry achieve its goals. The roadmap considers the supply of qualified personnel as the “most important” factor in the BPO industry’s continued growth.

“Talent will drive the growth of the industry,” said Garcia.

Majority of BPO companies in Cebu, and in the country in general, are contact centers while the rest provide non-voice services that include back office management, animation, transcription and software development.

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Spanco Telesystems BPO subsidiary, Spanco BPO Venture Ltd. and USbased MRS Associates Inc. have entered into an agreement which aims to generate revenues of USD100 million in two years.As per the partnership, Spanco Respondez, the international BPO arm of Spancos BPO business vertical will offer back office and contact centre services in Mumbai and Gurgaon.

As per the partnership, Spanco Respondez, the international BPO arm of Spancos BPO business vertical will offer back office and contact centre services in Mumbai and Gurgaon and will also increase its capacity to 2000 in 18 months. The tieup will cater to MRSs clients comprising of Fortune 500 companies in the Credit Card and Auto loan segment present in both 1st and 3rd party collections.

The deal is worked out in such a way that Spanco will end up owning 20 percent stake in MRS Associates Inc. and MRS in return will acquire 20 percent stake in Spanco Respondez.

According to Jeff Freedman CoFounder and CEO of MRS Associates, We are excited about partnering Spanco Respondez, there is a growing demand for cost efficient and high ramp up destinations like India and in Respondez we have found the right partner. The partnership will also help us leverage and replicate Respondez International expertise in Contact Center and BPO space onshore in the U.S. This will help us to jointly emerge as a vendor of choice in U.S outsourcing space.

Source : http://www.offshoringtimes.com/

Bangalore May 20 Over 5,000 freshers are needed in the healthcare BPO sector across the Southern cities. Healthcare BPOs, which offer jobs in transcription, billing, coding and clinical trials currently employ close to15,000 people now in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, according to Mr Manoj Pachisia, Director, NEXT, a BPO training institute. "Currently, healthcare BPOs are preferred jobs in the industry because they offer day shifts and are non-voice based processes," he said.

To cater to the talent needs of the industry, NEXT has launched a 26-week open training programme for freshers in the industry. "Talent squeeze in the market has resulted in companies relaxing the hiring criteria by one notch and let the training companies do the rest," says Mr Pachisia.

Healthcare BPO is a Rs 200-crore industry providing solutions such as customer management systems, maintenance of electronic medical record services to healthcare service providers, health insurance companies and life sciences, and medical equipment firms.

NEXT's open programme for healthcare BPO gives job aspirants in the industry basic knowledge on medicine and its terminologies, international hospital work culture and practices, medical claims processing, medical transcription, medical billing and coding. Bangalore-based NEXT trains employees in insurance, telecom, tech support, retail and healthcare industries.

Source : http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/

THE fast-growing business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the country is not without problems and challenges.

The Business Processing Association Philippines (BPAP), has identified three key issues that should be addressed with a clear set of initiatives and an institutional framework to sustain momentum.

The three issues are: talent, which require that the supply of qualified workers be sustained; the business environment, referring to the government’s predictable and consistent regulatory policies, and; the next wave cities, which means that additional cities should be tapped to house the different BPO players doing business in our country.

The above issues can be dissected in the light of the present circumstances and realities. In the case of availability of qualified workers, the industry should confront the need to attract more talent. Efforts have to be made to make the supply meet the skill requirements of the offshoring and outsourcing industry. Focus must be made on the English language, problem solving skills and other competencies required by the industry.

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The Kenya Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Society is set to introduce a set of standards and ethics guidelines that is expected to be enacted in Parliament.

"The standards are a major marketing tool for Kenya," said BPO Society Chairperson Gilda Odera. "We need to convince prospective businesses that their information is safe with us and that the society has a way of enforcing the standards."

The society invited the Kenyan ICT community to comment on standards and ethics of management practices relating to leadership, customer service, human and technical resources and operations.

The standards have been developed to cover all aspects of the BPO sector and to provide all customers with consistently good experiences, said David Otwoma, chairperson of the society's Standards and Ethics Committee.

In the past, Western corporations have engaged local companies, only to be disappointed with the level of service. If Parliament makes the guidelines into law, it will be a step toward convincing major corporations to outsource back-office operations to Kenya, Odera said.

The standards will be developed in conjunction with the Kenya Bureau of Standards and benchmarked on the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals code of ethics, Customer Operations Performance Center and the Victorian Government code of practice for call centers.

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IT-BPO firms, which are already facing a US slowdown and currency fluctuations, are now busy in firming up their plans to tackle a rising inflation in the country and its impact on salary, sales, general and administrative (SG&A) and travel costs, which can dent their profit margins.

According to analysts, the immediate impact of a rising inflation would be on salary. Avinash Vashishta, Tholons Investment Advisory Research, said: "Salaries will now have to be hiked by more than what the companies had decided. Last year, there was almost a 15 per cent rise in salary, while this year it may go up by 8-9 per cent."

Most companies, including India's largest IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Satyam, implemented their annual wage hike in the first quarter of the financial year beginning April 1. Others such as Wipro do it during the year. If inflation continues throughout the year the firms would have to effect a mid-term hike or raise the salary by a good measure in the next financial year.

Ganesh Natarajan, MD, Zensar, said: "Inflation will not have any impact on a short-term basis. But in the long-run, we will have to restructure our business plans. We need to recalculate cost of operations, salaries and investments happening if inflation sustains over a long period."

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Bangalore, June 10: NASSCOM president Mittal said that the growth of IT and BPO industry is expected to take a hit by 3-4 pecent in the current fiscal owing to the slowdown in the slowdown in the US economy and spurt in the crude oil prices.

"The fundamentals of the IT industry remains strong. However, various factors like slowdown in the US economy, weak US dollar and spurt in the crude oil prices will adversely affect the IT and BPO industry," Mittal told reporters on the sidelines of the NASSCOM BPO Strategy Summit here.It is hard to make a forecast but the growth is expected to be 3-4 cent less than last year, when it grew by 29 per cent, he said.

"During the next three to four years, we are looking at a sustained growth in the 20s but due to various reasons, forecasting an exact figure will be hard. This slowdown will help us see the opportunities to improve efficiency and margins. In July, we will come out with firm numbers on the growth of the industry", Mittal said.

OneIndia News

The country's outsourcing companies are confident the industry's growth will not be stopped by U.S. economic woes or negative portrayals in the press.

At the concluding session of Nasscom's BPO Strategy Summit in Bangalore recently, 24/7 Customer's co-founder S Nagarajan made an unusual and passionate plea. He asked the large audience to write letters to newspapers whenever they found articles that portrayed the BPO industry in a negative light. "If you have different experiences from that stated in the articles, you should all write to the editors concerned," he said.

The reference was clearly to articles that have highlighted issues like sex and drugs at the workplace, much of that said to be provoked by the young age of those who work in such jobs, and the fact that most BPO jobs involve working through the night. We won't get into the merits of that here. But the reason Nagarajan was provoked to make that statement was this: He believes those articles are exaggerated, and, more importantly, he believes if there is anything that can put the brakes on the industry's growth, it's people's belief that BPOs aren't 'good' places to work in. Parents will discourage their children from entering the profession. In short, the industry won't get the talent it requires.

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At the concluding session of Nasscom's BPO Strategy Summit in Bangalore recently, 24/7 Customer's co-founder S Nagarajan made an unusual and passionate plea. He asked the large audience to write letters to newspapers whenever they found articles that portrayed the BPO industry in a negative light. "If you have different experiences from that stated in the articles, you should all write to the editors concerned," he said.

The reference was clearly to articles that have highlighted issues like sex and drugs at the workplace, much of that said to be provoked by the young age of those who work in such jobs, and the fact that most BPO jobs involve working through the night. We won't get into the merits of that here. But the reason Nagarajan was provoked to make that statement was this: He believes those articles are exaggerated, and, more importantly, he believes if there is anything that can put the brakes on the industry's growth, it's people's belief that BPOs aren't 'good' places to work in. Parents will discourage their children from entering the profession. In short, the industry won't get the talent it requires.

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Think IT, think South India. Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad have seen unprecedented growth in the last decade owing to the growth of the information technology sector. But, could Bangalore be 'Bangalored' by its own neighboring town? Could Vijayawada or Madurai be the next BPO boomtowns?

Mysore is known as much as for Mysore Pak as it is known for Brindavan Gardens and the Chamundi Hills. This sleepy city has been witnessing a quiet IT revolution since 2003.

According to a NASSCOM - A.T Kearney study, Mysore is all set to breakout into the big league on the BPO scene because of availability of talent and the city’s proximity to Bangalore. So, while the big firms like Infosys, Wipro and HCL are setting up big global trading and delivery centers here, it’s the smaller firms that are actually able to dig in their heels into the local talent pool.

HTMT Global Solutions is one of the first BPO companies is to set-up shop in Mysore. Benjamin Franklin, the Deputy GM at HTMT tells that the 250-seater facility is far exceeding his expectations. Set-up just 1.5 years ago, it has seen some of it’s first employees now become team leaders. The response from the city has been so good that HTMT is already looking to expand by over 500-seats.

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Insurers in Europe and the United States are increasingly considering policy administration business process outsourcing BPO, says a new report by London based independent market analyst . Facing challenging market conditions, both life and non life insurers are seeking to reduce costs and gain flexibility. Often times, however, these goals are stymied by rigid policy administration platforms, which are frequently built in house, Datamonitors report states.

The report concludes that insurers need to reduce costs and become more efficient in order to protect profit margins during this and future soft markets. Further, insurers in the mature markets of North America and Western Europe that are struggling to find new pockets of growth need a flexible policy administration system that enables quicker time-to-market. Policy administration BPO can effectively increase efficiency and flexibility, as well as free resources that can then be expended on value-add functions, according to the research group.

Insurers are increasingly targeting the policy administration function to improve their competitiveness, says Jonathan Steiman, a financial services technology analyst with Datamonitor and the reports author. Business process outsourcing, which is often less capital intensive and less time consuming than other options, is being considered by more and more insurers.

Steiman warns, however, that along with the benefits come some risks. Outsourcing the policy administration function can greatly improve an insurers operation, which is imperative in todays market, but insurers are still wary of losing control of the customer and becoming over-dependant on a single vendor. Many of these risks, Steiman adds, can be mitigated with a comprehensive service-level agreement SLA.

Datamonitor’s report notes that both large and small insurers will adopt BPO. Currently, insurers with fewer than 5,000 employees currently have the lowest policy administration BPO adoption rate, however, this is likely to change. According to a Datamonitor survey of 200 global insurers conducted in the first quarter of 2008, small insurers are heavily weighing a BPO strategy, which is evidence of the need to lower costs and concentrate limited resources on value-add functions in today’s competitive marketplace.

The survey also found that large insurers those with more than 20,000 employees are increasingly likely to outsource policy administration. Typically, these players engaged in off-shoring via captives, or company owned facilities. The captive route has not been as fruitful as expected, elevating their interest in outsourcing to a third party.

The trends captured by our survey are incredibly interesting, notes Steiman. On the one hand, we see small insurers looking to outsource in order to improve competitiveness. On the other hand, we see large insurers, many of whom already having gone overseas with captives, being drawn to outsourcing because of the maturity and expertise that BPO providers now possess.

Many of today’s BPO arrangements can be classified as traditional, or your mess for less, BPO. In other words, insurers look to BPO providers to perform the same functions on the same platforms, but for less money. The savings in traditional BPO are typically driven by moving the process offshore to low-wage countries.

Source : http://www.offshoringtimes.com/

BANGALORE: Infosys BPO, the business process outsourcing subsidiary of Infosys Technologies and i-mint, India's first multi-partner consumer rewards programme, have partnered to launch the i-mint-Infosys employee reward programme for Infosys BPO employees.

The programme would be launched with a Infosys co branded i-mint card.

The program would add considerable value to Infosys' employees, who would for the first time receive i-mint points as rewards and can also earn points across the i-mint network of partners such as Airtel, HPCL, Air India, ICICI Bank, Lifestyle, Makemytrip.com among others.

The employees can redeem their points from the vast i-mint rewards catalogue on www.imintpoints.com.

About the launch Amitabh Chaudhry, CEO and MD, Infosys BPO said, "Infosys BPO is the Employer of Choice where careers are build and this initiative further validates our best people practices making it a Great Place to Work for".

Vijay Bobba, CEO, Loyalty solutions and Research said "Developing new partnerships is the key to our success. We look to constantly provide value to our customers and our partners. i-mint has a strong presence in the retail, banking, aviation and telecom sectors and it has been a conscious call to enter the BPO sector with employee rewards."

Source : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/

The business process outsourcing (BPO) market is forecast to hit $450bn by 2012.

BPO total contract value grew across all major regions worldwide in 2007, fostered by increased capabilities among suppliers, says analyst NelsonHall.

The credit crunch will hasten organisations move offshore, as companies look to reduce costs and buy their way into emerging growth markets, particularly in the financial services and telecoms sectors, the report says.

The emerging economies of Asia and Latin America will ride the crest of this wave, housing support functions such as finance and accounting services, and benefiting from the relocation of existing shared services centres.

The report predicts services such as customer management services, payments and other industry-specific financial sector services, and recruitment process outsourcing will benefit directly from the trend of companies buying into growth markets.

Source : http://services.silicon.com/

Infosys has come late to the BPO space but now the company is making all the right moves to scale up fast.

Amitabh Choudhary, CEO of Infosys BPO, has set a steep target of $1 billion in revenue in three years, which is four times its current revenue.

Infosys BPO is growing exponentially at 70 per cent every year, a stark contrast to its IT business growing at 20 per cent.

According to Choudhary, the management has realised that it is important to have an IT and BPO pay together to expand.

But growth alone will not be enough to log in to the billion-dollar league, so Infosys will have to buy more companies like Philips BPO that they acquired last year.

"We have shown through Philips that we can pay the right price and do so again," said Choudhary.

It is surely good news for Infosys investors since a fast growing BPO would mean more revenues for the company, but Infosys BPO is still no match for global biggies like WNS and Genpact unless it scales up extensively through mergers and acquisitions.

Source : http://www.ndtvprofit.com/

Krishnagiri (TN), June 15 Padma, 22, a first time earner from an agricultural family, proudly displays her TVS Scooty. Her colleague Vijay, 25, is the breadwinner for a five-member family which owns five buffalos. Each earns about Rs 5,000 a month, working for Fostera (Fostering Technologies in Rural Areas), rural business process outsourcing (BPO) initiative in Krishnagiri district.

Both Padma and Vijay, trained in typing, do data processing work and insurance form filling for All State Insurance of the US. Data is sent by the company to Fostera by e-mail. The e-mail is transcripted, data is filled up in the form and sent back to the insurance company by e-mail, said Mr M.R. Ashok Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Fostera.

Fostera is also involved in police data management work for Krishangiri district, government ration work and base survey work for the Karnataka Government, he said.

Some of the villages in Krishnagiri were once known for their Naxalite activities. Today, the BPO initiative under Fostera is changing the landscape of this district, located 100 km from Bangalore.

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information week's latest poll on enterprise use of business process outsourcing reveals a mix of angst and opportunities.

Concerns over data security and the difficulty of managing business process outsourcing projects are no match for the relentless drive to cut costs, a recent InformationWeek reader poll finds.

More than seven out of 10 companies surveyed are forging ahead with BPO initiatives, even as a sizeable minority expresses dissatisfaction with results. Perhaps even more interesting is that another small cadre of companies surveyed sees BPO not only as a cost-cutting tool, but as a way to push strategic agendas, such as transforming processes or increasing revenue.

Our research also suggests that this will be a difficult transition--and one that not all clients and vendors will survive.

That makes another key phenomenon we identified seem even more like rolling the dice. Knowledge process outsourcing, or KPO, is an offshoot of BPO that encompasses high-level business processes requiring professional judgment. Think risk management and modeling, even actuarial work. Compare that with less rigorous BPO activities, such as handling customer queries, applications, and orders, and you begin to see the schism picked up by our survey. Is the imperative to slash spending worth putting mission-critical business decisions into the hands of outsiders?

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The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the weakening of the US Dollar have rendered several rude shocks to the outsourcing industry in 2007. Indian companies were especially hit as the Rupee appreciated by 10.9% in the last 12 months (14.2% in the last 15 months) against the US Dollar. Investors, analysts and the media have been speculating about the impact of margin pressures, risk of business loss in the US, further Rupee appreciation coupled with domestic inflation, etc. This will continue through 2008, as we watch the US slowdown play out – much depends on the extent of the slowdown (will it become a full-blown recession?).

Interestingly, despite worries on the margin front, outsourcing growth expectations stand tall. In our interaction with vendors across the outsourcing spectrum (IT, BPO and KPO), optimism is the prevailing mood, especially as concerns top-line growth. As a result, companies are gearing up to face the year with aggressive plans coupled with some innovative strategies to fight margin pressures. Either way, 2008 promises to provide plenty of action for the outsourcing industry. Our analysts have put together a list of key trends that we believe will make an impact in 2008.

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