After several months of benchmarking, Pentalog’s Board of Directors has decided that Vietnam would be the company’s third offshore location. Pentalog, belonging to the top 30 of European nearshorers, was attracted by the association of a growing demography and a fast-improving higher education system. The authorities’ strong commitment to develop a leading edge technology stands out against the current decline in Ukraine and Russian province cities. And Morocco still does not seem to keep its promises regarding the practice of foreign languages (Pentalog acted in 7 countries in 2008) and the number of educated engineers.

The launch of the Vietnamese project was entrusted to Monica Jiman, the Eastern Europe Vice President, manager of the Bucharest office and in charge of operations and business development there since 4 years. Monica will transfer the Pentalog way of working to Tuan Nguyen Quoc, who has been chosen to manage the Hanoi agency. Tuan Nguyen Quoc has a Master’s Degree from Paris Dauphine. He is an English-speaker. Monica Jiman, who graduated from the University of Orleans, will spend 6 months in Hanoi. Pentalog will also rely on its Romanian and French project managers and developers to ensure the project’s consistency with quality standards of the group.

Pentalog Vietnam is integrated into Pentalog’s Right Cost policy, which was launched 9 years ago, and brings the company its first « extreme low cost » capacity. Vietnam is probably the most competitive country in the world in terms of quality-price ratio. We will probably hire 50 Vietnamese active team members before the end of 2009. With 25 employees in France, 260 in Romania-Moldova and 50 in Vietnam, Pentalog should be able to offer the best cost-ratio available in Western Europe (92% of the team members are based offshore-nearshore). Many additional cooperations relying on the Romanian hub should be launched in the following months.

Frédéric Lasnier, Pentalog CEO quickly describing the objectives of this project: “to offer the Pentalog service quality, meet our clients’ growing needs, set up our training programme, with a price of EUR 100/day for a dedicated team, in other words a 40% discount to our average rates”.

Good news for today. The leaders of two sectors join forces to create a new entity designed to offer assistance and online back-office services to companies established in the Eastern Europe. Acticall is the second French operator on the call-center market with 3000 positions. Acticall is at present the first provider for the CAQ 40 companies.

For its part, Pentalog is the leader of offshore/nearshore IT services in the Eastern Europe with more than 250 engineers on 4 production sites in Romania and one in Moldova. The group relies today on 295 collaborators.

The two groups maintain their partnership since 2002. Thanks to this alliance, Acticall will have the benefits of Pentalog’s expertise on the Eastern European countries (Pentalog is also present in Ukraine for consultancy activities). From our point of view, Pentalog will strengthen its BPO Business Line activities (contract management, content management, financial and accountancy operations…). The new company will be based in Chisinau, Moldova, who, thanks to the exceptional multilingualism (Russian, Romanian, French, English, Italian, and Ukrainian) caught the attention of the two partners. This joint-venture, named “Acticall Eastern Europe, a joint venture by Pentalog and Acticall” will be supervised by Pentalog’s executives. At present Pentalog is the 5th IT outsourcing player in Romania and the 1st in terms of expansion, with a 100% growth in 2007 and 2008.

With this economic crisis which get’s day by day more serious, I believe that it is crucial to foresee, after a first period potentially favourable to the low cost production modes, that these countries will also be affected by the economic slowdown. The Indians already know it since many giants have already reduced their workforce by 10% or more.

A number of our colleagues, Romania and Moldova, working for the U.S. or the UK (countries with an already major offshore maturity), know it. What should do the IT specialists in order to prepare themselves for the crisis? I see two key strategies: choosing an employer who knows how to manage his risk portfolio and to upgrade his versatility.

1. Choosing an employer with a strong commercial dynamic: many projects, many clients, frequent opening of new projects, multiple geographic origins, avoid companies too specialized or sector niche. Prefer outsourcers to software editors. Choose multi-specialized companies. Prefer a developing start-up on non-mature offshore markets (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux..). Does this remind you of such a company? However, I truly believe in it. It’s an old technique spreading the risk. Although probably no sector will be spared by this crisis, some are more concerned than others.
2. Be more versatile: the IT specialists from low cost countries are often specialized to idiocracy. They are frequently trained by Microsoft during University (through partnership programs). They are often convinced that we can not be Java when we are dotnet or otherwise. Often they confuse language and technology. We recently had to let go two people REFUSING Java training. Can you believe it? An IT specialist saying “no” to training. As if their whole career will use only one language! Or that being trained to Java will exclude them from other Microsoft projects! I am on my third economic crisis since the beginning of my career. The one of 92-95 (after a burst of real-estate bubble), the one of 2002-2004 (the Internet burst bubble). We innovate today with a banking crisis. All I can say to everybody is that those who have crossed the most difficult years were those who knew best to move from one folder to another, no matter the language they used. It’s pure arithmetic, since there are fewer projects, we must be more agile to be part of it. We don’t choose a language as we were choosing our religion. Personally, I am very proud that I can speak French, English, German and Romanian and this allowed me to multiply by 3 the geographical origins of our client projects and likely to increase by 3 the commercial signatures. It’s the same thing with Java, PHP or Dotnet. Knowing several languages is certainly a way forward to the positions of manager and management techniques. Add that what I say about the languages may also be extended to different specialties: DBA, Business Intelligence …

The question now is at what point would the economics of IT offshore be affected by this storm, but its violence has surprised many countries in only a few days. Its spread is staggering. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to prepare before being affected! We belong to a profession that eludes most of the time more unemployed than others, but you must know that this rate has exceeded 10% for several months in the early 2000s! Offshorers, nearshorers, developers, analysts, administrators, let’s prepare for the storm! Maybe this will scare it off!

For the 3rd year in a row, Mircea and I, we are present, until this afternoon, at the stand of Romania at the IT trade fair in München. We learned that this would be that last fair edition, at least in this form. The München Messe GmbH announced at a press conference before yesterday that the show would be replaced from 2009 by 2 new events: one on security and one which we know nothing yet.

Officially, they say that this change is made in order to adapt to the changing IT markets and business expectations. They avoided referring to the number of exhibitors which, according to an exhibition neighbour attending this fair since 2000, was divided by 2 in a few years and the number of visitors (I have noticed myself and I frequented this show only the last 3 years) was constantly falling and so it was time to innovate a bit.

It is well known that the decline of interest in this kind of event is a general trend, partly because the site was right for them. But I think that it comes also from these events themselves. The firs time I went to CeBit in 2006, I was outraged by the impression of “fair”, in the negative sense, that the show left me. A noisy and colourful spectacle that seemed more for the general public than for the professionals. Without a stand of minimum 200m2 we were soon flooded in the mass. The SYSTEMS fair seems to have a more “pro” orientation, but it is obvious that this several decades old event needs a make-over.

All this to say that I find it unfortunate that trade show are losing so much speed. They are always a good opportunity, beside systematically providing new customers, to observe the competition, to listen to the clients’ positive or negative stories they have had with their offshore providers, brief to observe the market in order to be able to adjust our marketing strategy in order to fulfil expectations.

I’m curious and eager to discover the new concept that München Messe will propose for the next year. And I hope that the delegation representing the nearshore Romanian professionals will always be in the game.

Hanoi! On Friday the board of Directors decided that Pentalog would open its next office in the Vietnamese capital city. Several factors influenced this decision:

- the Asian location will complete the group’s marketing position
- it will bring additional benefits in terms of production costs compared to Ukraine and Romania
- Vietnam enjoys great political stability
- Hanoi disposes of a very good education system and is less glutted than Ho Chi Minh City
- the country has understood the importance of having very well-organized high level academic courses, all over its territory, through international partnerships
- Vietnam already has 3 investment poles of great interest for our future development.

About this last point, I believe that a second Pentalog office will be set up in the near future in Ho Chi Minh City. I am expecting it for the the beginning of 2009. Ho Chi Minh will also remain a luxury alternative in case of difficulties with our office in Hanoi. Of course we are definitely not closing the door to Ukraine, a country that is so close to us, but we consider that the Ukrainian people must urgently solve their political and financial problems if they want to attract new investors. I cannot expand in a country that hinders circulation of capital and has shut its eyes for 2 years to the crisis that was obviousls threatening it.

Back to our Vietnam project, we are going to get back in touch with the persons we met, the persons we have been talking to and those we are going to recruit…

You could read on this blog many news Fred wrote lately about Pentalog’s current development plans. There’s a lot of things currently happening on the international level. Plans with Asia, Ukraine, Germany…

Pentalog’s business model made the company one of the most innovative, solid and fast-growing-ones of its sector in Europe. Always one length ahead of its competitors, the group managed to make its offer evolve quickly in order to meet market evolution and seize new business opportunities, as well as to assert its position in the cities and countries where its offices have been set up. I think we can say without blushing that we have achieved a “global”
position in terms of service range, and we are now on the way to become a global provider from a geographical point of view also.

To sustain our expansion and growth objectives we expect to achieve in the short- and mid-term, we need to set up strong partnerships with IT companies accross countries where Pentalog has already started developing business relationships (Germany, Austria, Belgium) but also in new areas where we feel the Pentalog model may be successful. We think of countries like Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, the USA, hosting top-edge mid- and big sized companies in the IT service sector. Those companies could find in Pentalog the ideal leverage to develop their offer and market shares in offshore IT outsourcing. The current financial and economical context is likely to lead more companies to turn to offshore to remain competitive. This should generate all the more new opportunities for outsourcing vendors.

In 2007 we already set up an R&D department through our joint-venture alliance with a French company that enabled us to improve our expertise in embedded systems, and now representing an important service range in the group’s activities (18% of the group’s turnover). In 2008 we created a commercial branch in Germany and gained 10 new clients since then, within 6 months. We are now about to create a new development centre in another country. We really have gained substancial experience in company creation projects in foreign countries, managing cross-cultural relationships with our partners and learning a lot out of it. We are definitely ready to apply our model on a much larger geographical scale now, involving new languages, new technical skills, new time zones, new climates…

I feel the coming months are really going to be an exciting period for all Pentalog team members involved in the implementation of the company’s international growth strategy. I am delighted at the thought of the Europe map on our corporate flyer turning into a world map with plenty of new dots standing for all Pentalog locations!

So if you think you are one of these potential partners we are looking for, please contact us

Our second day in Odessa…

I took the liberty to resume Fred’s first impressions about Odessa and also to state my own ideas about this second day of our trip.

The second day at the Odessa University gives us a more optimistic picture. Anyway, I wasn’t 100% agreeing with Fred. As an ex-professor at a Romanian University I profoundly disagree with any discourse so unconnected to the students’ interests. Being a teacher, as any other job, implies sticking to the rules. In those labs we visited yesterday, we saw that the professors were involved and they were putting the students’ interest on top. Furthermore they express a highly international openness. Still, as I have already seen in some other Ukrainian cities, the linguistic skills are not sufficient. I mean the students’ skills, who don’t sufficiently manage international languages, which restricts international university inter-connection. Anyway, I admit that Ukraine has big potential.

While I was writing these lines, Serghei informed me that the Ukrainian financial system is about to go bankrupt (Petru is attending a mission in Kiev for an important bank). In theory, the banks stopped refunding deposits and no money leaves the country. This is one more reason to re-think our future strategy.

Odessa is truly a magnificent city. More than 2 million people urging on the streets where the luxury competes with the most beautiful European resorts. Monica, Serghei and I have visited the Polytechnic University and tomorrow we will visit the embedded systems labs.

The meeting we have had this morning with the teachers made us a little bit circumspect. It is quite clear that some Ukrainian cities are still looking for their IT models. We mention our training needs; they propose an association with our production structures. The professors from the LLC are clearly not fairly paid by the local system. They hope to see the day of an association with Intel, Microsoft or I don’t know who else!

Well, I have already seen this happen. Half of the teachers from one of our locations are paid by Siemens (while the DHR of Siemens is a university teacher), on some other location is Continental who rules and on the third one is Nokia. And we cannot blame them. Eventually these “collaborations” are positive. In some cases these collusions become too aggressive. I know a case where a company tries any form of pressure on the competitors, a company with an outstanding ethical chart, with any doubt. Tomorrow we will spend some time with the students and we will try to make an in-depth analysis of the difficulties the local professors encounter. We really want to help them, even if this was not the reason for our trip.

I arrived yesterday in Chisinau, just in time to meet one of our best clients for one hour and a half; I discover today the new flagship of our Eastern fleet! It looks really great. Take a look at the two pictures. It’s Saturday and there’s almost nobody here. But it’s spectacular, one of our best achievements. We can accommodate here 120 engineers and BPO operators without any trouble.

Before leaving tomorrow for Odessa, I took this morning a little tour at the wine festival. That was 3 years that I systematically missed it. Not very successful, no tasting of fine wines. Too bad for them, because I bought only 3 bottles, whereof one of Moldavian ice wine. Again, I took two pictures.

I have just returned from Vietnam and I already have planned another trip. This Friday I will be in Chisinau (Moldova) with one of our clients who wants to visit our office that he didn’t see yet. On Sunday, Serghei, Monica and I, we will go to the Black Sea coast, in Odessa, in order to make an in-depth analysis of the Ukrainian port capacities.

I couldn’t have waited to make this trip for several reasons. First, because the ideas clash into fertile “little big bangs”. I want to expose fresh ideas and then to announce which will be the next implantation of Pentalog on identical analysis bases. I’m sufficiently familiar with Ukraine at this moment. The strong points of these two competitors are extremely different:
- dispose of an Asian position or not
- proximity / change of continents
- cultural unity / cultural rupture
- 1h / 5h of time-lag
- 600€ / 500€
And finally there’s the sheer provocation, which is very important… I’m sure you’ll agree.

No, we cannot be as blind as Louis XVI now that the central nervous system (the banks) is about to explode.

We just hit the low end rates. We just hit recession. Several major banks will disappear with the cash. The consequences on the IT sector will certainly appear in a few days or weeks. From now on, the banks will build their success on emerging economies only.

European governments, especially French and German, must quickly liberalize the economy if we don’t want to fall into confrontation with Asia. We don’t get rich, we speculate. The proof of this is this stupid real-estate bubble created by low rates. Far from me the idea that Asia doesn’t speculate, on the contrary, it gets wealthy.

The offshore sector will also be affected, at least those who work for the financial world (India is already particularly affected). However, there is still much to gain on industry and non-financial services. Perhaps the ratio between the prices growth and the offshore costs will reverse due to unknown context? The small countries are already affected by the monetary consequences. The Romanian Leu collapses, restoring the Euro-Dollar competitiveness.

Anyway, this crisis is not too convenient to anyone. The weeks to come, we should be extremely aggressive, conqueror and proactive.

Photos from Hanoi

Vietnam Airlines tomorrow night.

Pentalog signs the first big contract with Germany.

This contract doubles the actual operations volume we had with Germany. This contract will bring more than 1M€ per year. For now, I don’t know if I can reveal the name of the client, but let’s say it’s one of the major software editors in Germany. In several months, this contract will gather 20 to 25 persons.

First part of the trip - Ho Chi Minh City
Second part - Hanoi

Saturday, in Saigon, I learnt some interesting information. Cap Gemini has abandoned the idea of a large East-European site (Iasi has been strongly considered). But the salary evolution in Romania must have influenced their intention; to be continued… Another French company, who announced its opening in Vietnam, has, all in all, only a small dedicated team of 5 people, sold by one of the largest local IT services companies. I begin to wonder if the giant French IT services companies will successfully open their offshore locations.

Monday in Hanoi I found out that France Telecom plans to open a Technology Centre in Vietnam. The spot is hot!

What else? Oh, yes, the Vietnamese offshore works as the Indian or Romanian companies did ten years ago. The surplus seems to be widespread. And the managers are surprised to see the turn-over! This is not a good example. The best of them give up, while the average gets in a rut. The best company, we had the opportunity to visit, has a charging staff of half of the total. It is a widespread model and the owners of these companies hope to give to their employees a general training at the lowest cost. The result is awful, because away from retaining their staff, they give a wrong idea about the productivity. It’s not the proper thing to do. We have had this problem since 2000 in Romania. Today, if we want to reach Vietnam, we will demand the same productivity ratio.

It is obvious that if we confirm this location, in a few weeks, we will have to replicate the model of Pentalog “nursery”. The challenges of communication between the European management and the local work force will be very consistent. A company that does not succeed in breaking the ice with its Vietnamese team would have no chance in reaching the levels of communication essential to respect the quality in our profession. The cultural factors are clearly crucial when moving to a country still living with the concept of “generational classes” and that seem to still show a certain mark of respect to the white people.

We arrived in Hanoi on Saturday, very late at night. Sunday was a very, very calm day. No appointments, after 4 we had on Saturday in Saigon and afterwards the plane to Hanoi, I swam 1km in the huge pool of a luxurious hotel. The afternoon was entirely reserved to a long walk around the lake. Abundance of beautiful villas, some of which seem to have been uprooted from Deauville, while those beside you remind instead the Promenade of Englishmen … below a slum, from afar a pagoda reflected in a lake.

Hanoi has the charm of a provincial town increased by the architectural structure and effect of a capital. I just made a reservation at a restaurant which claims to have 1000 oenological references!

Both cities have decidedly different advantages – How can I tie?

The 5th day since we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City. It’s spectacular. Ho Chi Minh makes me feel the same as other major former colonial cities that I have encountered. Most of those cities have become sprawling monsters. Nearly 10 million people are busy night and day to run this mega-city. Sometimes I am absolutely blown.

You don’t have to go to Saigon to see something, because there’s « almost » nothing to see. We go to Saigon for the rush and the atmosphere: suffocation, fun, speed! The people of Saigon “are” the richness of the city. We must see them live, eat on their small stools in the streets, selling you certified copies and certificates of authenticity for replica watches (a treat for the gourmet salesman), see them on their motorcycle waiting for the green light, like at the Tour de France.

I love this city. It reminds me of others that have nothing in common. It’s true that as older I grow, as more I love the speed. If I stop here, I feel that we are going to get this speed.

We are moving and our planning is rich. I already see the criteria for a successful location. Everyone talks about the turn over, but we have seen others in the Balkans. It is certain that Ho Chi Minh is a two stages settlement: local and offshore. A city of 9M people will not remain just an offshore place. The question is how long will it take to make this link? Maybe we should combine (as Bucharest until 2006)?

At this time, what worries me the most, is the mobile operators difficulties (the interconnection doesn’t work for several hours each day and the “Edge” continuously disappears, this is bad. This reduces by half what we could do in mobile telephony, if we don’t have the opportunity to test it. The Internet seems somewhat less problematic… if we have at least 3 providers.

In terms of resources, I begin to believe.

To be continued…

Post office with the picture of Ho Chi Minh
Notre Dame Cathedral

This article was written on September 19th, I don’t know when it will be published.
This business trip does not have the same effect on me as the other-ones had. I may be a bit anxious about thinking of working so far from our headquarters, or perhaps it comes from all these bittersweet and even violent images that come to our minds when one says “Vietnam”, or “Indochina”? The word Vietnam generates inspiring imaginary thoughts and we do not remember if those come from our history books, from frightening movies, or from Marguerite Duras and her world made of worm rain and soft light filtering through bays.
The last few days before the trip I did not have any time to breathe and to prepare myself for what I expect to be a violent but positive shock. Yesterday I was busy in Frankfurt and in the 4 countries I went to in the last 3 weeks so I could not concentrate on my mental preparation. Virginie and Alex have got everything set for me. Virginie is still reading her documents and notes before landing. I am not. These lines I am writing are the ones that will help me preparing my mind for this first Asian experience.
But what am I looking for? Mircea asked me 10 times within a few hours in Frankfurt. I guess I didn’t know what to answer. “Because you are French!” he said. My father asked me the same question, some people from Pentalog certainly wonder about this but didn’t dare asking me, since I was so busy with the perspective of a new continental adventure.
After all, Pentalog’s low cost production system works better than most of the European software production companies and it probably offers one of the best quality-price ratios in the world. It looks like it has a bright future. I will go further than the classical answers about the research for competitiveness. I believe that each continent represents a mental territory in everyone’s mind. What I want to know is what I can build for you on your mental Asian territory. What I want to know is what your mental Asian territory, mine and reality have in common. And I will draw my personal conclusions from this. One of our clients, an amazing start-up company, has already stated its intention to join us in this project because, as its chairman said “our solutions are built on hardware produced in Asia and sold to Asian customers”, and “getting a bit of the Asian spirit will be good for us”. Apart from this trip, we will of course assess several things as we usually do and look for fruitful encounters, as we know how to do. And we talk about all this. Also, we will assess the common “synchronization” difficulties with Europe as well, I mean how fast we can get a plane ticket, how we can work with Orleans, Frankfurt, Romania and Moldova in optimal conditions. We have almost 2 weeks to get serious results and answers. In 99, when I went to Romania for the first time, I spent 8 days there and another 8 days 2 months later.
At the moment I am finishing this post, 20 minutes have passed since we flew over Rostov-on-Don. We are now heading towards the Caucasus, however the GPS is still showing Tbilissi and Georgia, which we are unlikely to fly over, but I am thinking of them. We are leaving the mountains to our right, as I thought. We are authorized to fly over Grozni, the ripped and pacified capital of Chechnya. Even Vietnam Airlines aircrafts must comply with the Pax Putina! There we are, our plane just entered the Central Asia twilight. I can still see the Caspian Sea under a steamy veil like the tulle behind the bays of Marguerite, who dreams and dreams.

The last week-end our office from Chisinau changed its location. During 7 days, Pentalog’s support team had to move 2 offices, therefore 2 local data-centres and 110 collabs (of 265, that’s not bad, isn’t it?).

At Chisinau 3 we think big because we are going to double our number of potential openings. The office has 1000 m2 and it can accommodate more than 130 people.

Our office from Chisinau is the only one covering at 100% our offer of “Embedded systems”, “IT systems and software” and “BPO”.

It could also host the headquarters of a new joint-venture, developed with the second French operator of the call-centre market in order to provide solutions in French, Italian, Russian, Romanian and German languages. Its main domain of activity will be the multilingual technical assistance.

I will give updates about this the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, I wish godspeed to this new flagship of our Eastern fleet, its captain and all the crew!

Here we are. Last week end Greg and his staff moved to their new office, a more prestigious and commodious building. It’s true that the one on Sfantu (Saint) Lazar street had become a bit tiny and this is an euphemism! Last week we had reached a level of 32 employees on 180 m2, including the meeting room and the bosses’ office (we were lucky that the toilets were on the floor! ).
We chose the 2 highest floors of the most beautiful business buildings of the city. We doubled our surface and now enjoy a big terrace next to the meeting room. Greg just sent me some pictures.
So what is our new development plan in Iasi and how does it integrate with our strategic plan? Iasi 2 takes part in Pentalog’s « 14-2010 plan » that is meant to lead the group to a 14 M EUR sales figure by 2010 (only by means of organic growth, which means a rhythm of 35 to 45% p. a.). This figure is based upon our forecasted expansion in the countries where our company is already established. The second plan, « 30-2013 », is based on new production and sales areas.
Pentalog Iasi is thus expected to double its number of employees whithin the newt 12 months, which means repeating what was already achieved since last year (since we opened our office in August 2007). Greg and his team will rely on the city’s key factors of success:

In addition, the Pentalog in Chisinau (Rebublic of Moldova) is at a 2,5 hour-drive from Iasi and the two sites collaborate on several projects. Iasi is located in the ancient Moldavia. So there will soon be 200 of us in this region split between two countries. For now we are 265 people, among which 105 in the two parts of Moldavia.
Next week, it will be the turn of Pentalog Chisinau who will leave Puskin street, to double the office surface as well, in the framework of the 14-2010 plan.
I want to thank the support team of Alex who enabled the 35 Iasi people to start working in the new office without any technical problems. Good luck for next week in Chisinau!

What do you think of that?

This piece of news is likely to further strengthen the recently established partnership between ST-NXP Wireless and Pentalog Technology. Our Bucharest-Sibiu platform is clearly part of the greatest European adventure in industrial wireless technologies. It may even be the greatest European industrial adventure of the last 5 to 10 years? To be continued…

All those who regularly check social networks such as Viadeo, Xing or Linkedin, could notice that I am actively looking for partners or collaborators on different levels to help us launch our Pentalog Asia project. We don’t have a strict schedule (since we are not quoted, thank God!). Let’s just say that we would like to have an office with 50 persons by the next 24 months in China or in Vietnam. We expect our team to quickly grow to several hundred people. For now we are gathering information and we are open to discussions. We are interested in meeting potential managers for Asia, juniors ready to move over there, members of Asian communities willing to link together the two sides of their lives and already established entrepreneurs.

So, do not hesitate to contact me, either via a comment on this blog or by email through Viadeo, Linkedin or Xing.

Fred already mentioned on this blog the imminent launch of our new website dedicated to ultra low-cost services (BPO and Testing).
Now, there it is: www.madeinoffshore.com.
Enjoy and feel free to comment on it!

Tell me what type of BPO you handle and I’ll tell you who you are…

After almost 2 years experience with BPO, I thought it would be useful to drop a few lines on the subject. Everyone wants to do BPO and to take its share of the cake, considered as particularly hearty. And as someone told me not long ago, “BPO is easy”.

I would rather say that it depends and that it could sometimes even be very complex. The process can sometimes be composed of so many successive steps, that each sequence might need to be validated and that it is sometimes necessary to call on for a specialist for this.

So, without any doubt, a company that does not have a well-trained team in terms of process management will get it wrong.

What would be then the ideal organization to manage process outsourcing properly?

I believe that it has to combine at least 2 control levels:

1. Middlemen: each intermediate step must have its own control level (probabilistic or exhaustive).
2. The final level: specialists who know what results should be achieved. The method could either be based on a global assessment, if the process allows it, or if not, on sample assessment.

When producing BPO operations, the organization cannot tolerate any bugs on the tools or the organization anymore.

In the end, how can you expect a BPO team to know French tax shelter, Photoshop, German labour laws, Liechtenstein’s geography or any other thing that they have to deal with? You cannot and you should not count only on the operator himself when the work load becomes too big.

So, before you start a BPO operation, you should check that you have set up the right controls and that they are in the hands of the right persons. For outsourcing a process means industrialization and acceleration. If your controls are not right, your team will make systematic errors in no time. A serious BPO operation without strong management is simply impossible. Any takers?