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.

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.

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?

During the last months Pentalog has registered a boom in its BPO activities. In December the company used to employ only a dozen of persons working on non-technological outsourcing projects. At the end of April, about 45 team members are being mobilized on 3 types of processes:

* desktop publishing (7 positions)
* call centre and data processing (26 positions)
* administration, financial and accountancy services (12 positions)

These successful activities were mainly based on fixed price contracts so far. But they are now also accompanied by dedicated teams (time and material contracts), on a yearly basis. Pentalog has different types of customers in this area: cost killers looking for proposals for their own clients, firms that need to rapidly set up a database, NGO subcontracting their publishing activities. But the company also hosts three customer support centres and a tele-recruitment team working for a start-up company.

The major part of those operations is based in Moldova where Pentalog will reach a number of 80 employees in the weeks to come, 50% of them being BPO operators. The others are mainly IT development engineers.

The proximity of development, network administration and BPO teams all together is an undeniable asset when a business process platform has to be set up.

By the end of April, Pentalog will expand to 230 employees (185 in IT, R&D and infrastructure management) in accordance with its 2008 business plan. Finally, Pentalog will soon launch a website and a brand strictly designed to promote “low cost” services (BPO and Testing).

On Monday Pentalog starts a new outgoing phone-calls operation in its Moldovan premises in Chisinau. We will have to establish not less than several thousands of contacts for one of our clients. We are raising a team of 20 persons, with 2 developers to set up the application that will be used to manage the contacts. Thereafter, 10 of these consultants will remain in charge of other services for the same client.

Together with two other teams created already several months ago, our contact centre now represents 26 positions, all of them located Moldova so far. If we add to this the dozen of persons currently working on financial and accountancy files, 3 web marketers and 5 persons working on desktop publishing, we reach a total of 44 persons dedicated to BPO actions within Pentalog. They were only 12 at the end of December 2007. Well, it is true that 50% of these actions are outright contracts, which means we will have to work very hard from the commercial point of view to validate this action and extend dedicated teams.

So, almost 20% of our workforce (230 persons by the end of April) are part of these new activities in Western Europe: the outsourcing of administrative and non technological operations. After 18 months of experience in this field, we are now convinced by the relevance of associating BPO activities with IT, as the Indian enterprises do. At first in order to have the means to check operations’ effectiveness but also to enhance their productivity (for example pre-loading and formatting of the data to be processed). And finally it is a way of introducing the “business” point into an offshore IT centre. And this is quite interesting for developing different business approaches in the engineering teams.

All this is progressively resulting in half a million Euros of BPO sales. This could bring with itself some questions of identification of the company which is seen as a top of the range offshore provider with high technical standards. We will have to make people understand that BPO does not mean “low quality”, on the contrary.

Anyway, in the coming weeks we will launch a new brand completely devoted to the promotion of our “low cost” services: BPO and testing.

And on the other hand in a few days I shall give you some news about the R&D offer, which is also evolving at the moment.

I often complain about the slow rollout of our new services. But this is normal, since I am the boss. But it’s also true that it’s sometimes difficult to make a company’s position evolve.

In 2006 we launched our BPO offer and at the beginning of 2007 the R&D offer (mainly embedded software). The R&D activity has developed significantly and now represents 35 engineers and technicians, after 12 months only.

Now I want to come back to lower added value activities: BPO. This activity used to represent no more than a dozen of employees, mostly on our Moldovan premises so far. However after 18 months it seems to be growing. We suddenly jumped from 12 to 25 persons within 2 months, in content management, webmarketing services (e-mailing, web-tracking, content management) and financial and accountancy services.

But since we are considered as a High Tech offshore leader, it’s quite difficult to assert ourselves in the “non technological” field. This lead us to the idea of calling upon call center activities, for the first time in 8 years of web marketing.

While our R&D range perfectly matches our IT company profile and didn’t demand any particular effort.

Next week we will launch a marketing operation from our Process Center from Chisinau (Moldova), targeting the western European market. A young Moldovan call center operator, in charge of advertising sales, may contact you.

She will promote the activities of our 6 front line and back office operators, her 6 colleagues working on content management, the 7 working on financial and accountancy operations and the 4 marcom specialists.

We thought it would be nice to prove the efficiency of these services from the first contact. Our continuous effort to globalize our offer also leads us to globalize our tools.

I will come back to our marcom tools the days to come with a report on HR activities.