At a time when new technologies are becoming the main business carrier,
communication is now all about transparency.
Aymeric Libeau
CIO - Vice President Infrastructures and R&D
CIO - Vice President Infrastructures and R&D
Monica Jiman
COO - Vice President Business Development
COO - Vice President Business Development
Alexandra Mondanel
International Operations Officer
Relying on partnership in diverse geographical, economical and cultural environments is the best way to sustain a strategy based on strong growth and international expansion.
Hélène Hemery
Marketing Manager
Marketing Manager
Sophie Lelarge
WW Sales and BL Director
WW Sales and BL Director
Pierre Peutin
Head of Business Line for Information Systems
Head of Business Line for Information Systems
Mickaël Hiver
Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO
Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO
Eric Gouin
Administrator
Administrator
Aleth Delcenserie
Quality Manager
Men accept change only when needed and they see need only in crisis", Jean Monnet, founding father of European unity.
Tuan Nguyenquoc
Office Manager Hanoi
A Vietnamese proverb says "When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree". Here, each employee takes part in growing the company and enjoys its fruit.
Frédéric Lasnier Title: President&Chief Executive Officer Bio: After a quick passage in a national marketing service company, Frederic Lasnier founded Pentalog with four colleagues, academics like himself. During a period of economic stagnation (in 1993).
In 1995, he decided to open permanently the capital of Pentalog to the participation of his employees. This participation now has reached 56%. It was a political vision that he shared with the founding members. Starting from 1997, Pentalog exported their first services outside of France. The percentage of foreign activities subsequently reached 60% in 2006.
In 1999, as part of a large software project (10 000 man-days in J2EE), he made his first trip to Romania and laid the foundation for the Pentalog policy of European "low cost". In 2005, he initiated the creation of BPO services (Business Process Outsourcing) and offered a New Business Model to Pentalog High Tech.
In 2006, with the help of Ausy, one of the 5 most important players in the French market of outsourced R&D services, he created Pentalog Technology, a joint venture between Ausy and Pentalog, co-owned equally by the two partners. The Joint Venture aims to provide low cost but high quality R & D to global players. Pentalog took operational control of this alliance.
In 2008, Pentalog Deutschland, the German subsidiary of the group was created.
In 2009, Frederic created Pentalog Vietnam.
In all these areas, the management is provided from Orleans and it is here where 70% of the consolidated value is held.
Frederic is the father of the adaptation of the "design to cost" for intellectual services in France.
Aymeric Libeau Title: CIO - Vice President Infrastructure & R&D Bio: The management of infrastructure and R&D Aymeric is supervising includes all the technical aspects (for the company as well as for our customers), whether they are related to corporate needs, resources to complete a project, R&D activities or quality control.
Aymeric is the one who defines the strategy of development of our infrastructure and information system.
This former peacekeeper has led several international operations, in particular in Eastern Europe. He remains operational for some of our customers, whether as an expert in architecture, a project director or consultant in the choice of technologies.
Monica Jiman Title: COO - Vice President Business Development Bio: Monica graduated in Marketing and Production from the University of
Orleans, and joined Pentalog as a trainee.
She then became the Manager of the branch office in Bucharest, today employing 50 people in the field of outsourced software development on the offshore as well as local market in Romania.
In May 2009 she became Chief Operational Officer. Monica is now in charge of operations in Vietnam, Eastern Europe, France and Germany, involving over 300 employees. She manages sales and business lines, the creation of new branch offices, recruitment, human resources and the responsibility of contractual operations.
Alexandra Mondanel Title: International Operations Officer Bio: After a 4-month internship within the Pentalog Orleans Team, Alexandra was recruited to develop the company's international activities. She holds a postgraduate degree in International Business and foreign languages and she is European to the core: her mother is German and her father is French; she attended a British University, and used to work for the German subsidiary of a French company before joining Pentalog in 2005. Her ability to speak four languages will be determining to find partners all accross Europe.
Sophie Lelarge Title: WW Sales and BL Director Bio: Sophie is the group's Sales Director and manages the 3 Business Lines: Information Systems, Embedded Systems and BPO.
She ensures the dialogue with consultants and project managers, as well as the monitoring of our commitments, in coordination with the project managers.
Pierre Peutin Title: Head of Business Line for Information Systems Bio: Pierre entered Pentalog as a developer, in 1999. He has worked on web and client/servers projects, on missions of medium and long duration in both France and Belgium. After several years as a developer, Pierre oriented himself towards Business Intelligence by participating in various reporting projects for customers like PSA Peugeot Citroën, Loxam or the ACTICALL group. Later, Pierre became Project Leader for specific application developments, managing teams of 1 to 7 people based in France and offshore for Pentalog. Pierre then naturally served as an offshore Project Director before taking on the responsibility of the Business Line for Information Systems.
Pierre is presently responsible for writing business proposals, monitoring existing customers, commitment control vis-à-vis our customers on projects, compliance with Pentalog quality system procedures and control and optimization of expenses for the Business Line.
Mickaël Hiver Title: Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO Bio: Mickaël entered Pentalog as a Network Administrator in February 1997 with the aim to gain global understanding of information technology in order to assist and guide users in meeting their real needs. For 8 years he was an in-house producer for Pentalog clients. With his acquired experience, Mickaël progressively left production to become first a Project Manager, then Project Director and finally the Head of Business Lines for Embedded Systems & BPO.
Mickaël is a hands-on and open person, with an acute sense of organization and priorities. Through his assistance and counseling he gives his clients and prospective clients the opportunity to focus calmly on their actual core business.
Eric Gouin Title: Administrator Bio: Eric graduated from a renown school of Physics and Chemistry in Paris. While he was a student he used to develop websites related to his student activities.
After two research internships within a French company producing mobile phone components in the Sophia-Antipolis Technopole, he joined the IT world in which he held several key positions.
He now is a finance and management control consultant.
Aleth Delcenserie Title: Quality Manager Bio: Associate-founder of Pentalog and board member, Aleth Delcenserie first evolved in the graphics department of the company. Gifted with a strong sense of organization and a taste for detail, she conducted with rigorous methodology publishing projects and electronic media for over ten years, and launched the Pentalog BPO-DTP sector at the end of 2005.
From September 2007, Aleth has been responsible for the definition and for the implementation of the Pentalog Quality Policy, leading to the ISO 9001:2008 certification of the group, on December 24, 2008.
As the Director of Quality Control, Aleth is now based in Moldova since 1 January 2009, where she now shares her time between coaching project managers in implementing effectiveness control and the progress of Pentalog Quality.
Tuan Nguyenquoc Title: Office Manager Hanoi Bio: Tuan holds a Master's Degree in Information Systems and New Technologies from the Paris-Dauphine University, and gained some professional experience in France before returning to Vietnam to start his offshore adventure. He became a team leader in a Datawarehouse deployment project in Africa for a telecom provider, and witnessed violent riots in Kinshasa during a couple of days.
Following this project, Tuan turned to a Marcom position as the offshore business development manager of a big Vietnamese IT services company.
While reading the Pentalog blog Tuan became acquainted with Frederic and they met during Frederic's first visit in Vietnam. He was immediately convinced by Pentalog's business model and now manages the development of the first Pentalog office in Vietnam.
Feedback on McKinsey’s EestCom: Pentalog was part of the panel
On June 22nd and 23rd the Eest Com summit was held in Bucharest as part of the European tour of the Indian Nasscom. All the top clients and suppliers of the European offshore and nearshore sectors were eager to participate. I was invited to be a part of the “Vendors” panel, next to Luksoft. If I haven’t resumed this subject yet, it is because I haven’t taken the time to do it. The high level of McKinsey’s speakers, the maturity of their approach on a range of subjects simply dazzled me. Of course, there are a number of topics which would have deserved to be discussed, but were not, such as the notions of critical size, economy of scale etc. Other subjects could have been better covered. The audience was left wanting for more when the subject of recruitment was approached by the HR panel.
As far as I am concerned, I learned a lot of things in the “Customers” panels on the practice levels of giant clients. I was surprised by the poorness of the supplier analysis made by the CIO of a very large German insurance company. The audience didn’t waste the chance to talk to them afterwards. Why is there no metric system, why are there no KPIs, no SLAs? Then, questions were asked on the new relationship between clients and providers, on true long-lasting partnerships, within precise quality frameworks and the business models that derive from them.
I was particularly charmed by the questions concerning the ramp-up and the large platform training periods, with the inevitable phase during which the offshoring, due to the costs of transfer, training and functioning which is reduced to half at the beginning… becomes more expensive than the previous monthly cost; sometimes twice or three times as much. This period, taking into account the risk felt by customers, and the likely increase in costs during the first year, may undermine the launching of the project. I have personally gone through this phase twice within a very large project. The solutions proposed, based on a genuine financial reflection, are not simple in the field of commercial engineering. The co-financing of this period, if project management is done under a 3 to 5 CMMI constraint, by observing numerous metric benchmarks and SLAs, may lead you directly to an agreement governance carried out by the two general management departments. At this moment, the partnership is very strong and the JV is not far away.
I must confess that with 2 offshore projects at present whose value is over € 2.5 million/year (for several years), three clients which exceed one million a year and a 50/50 JV, Pentalog is particularly interested in these customer-supplier partnership questions. The particularly high level of the consultants and of the audience enabled me to gather information that we are going to include in Pentalog’s offer.
In fact, the senior consultant who organized the event confirmed what I already thought. Pentalog has become the greatest nearshore structure of the European Union . Pentalog is already on the European podium which includes Russia and the Maghreb and is also the leading French-speaking nearshore organization on the world market. Moreover, I would like to add that following some very interesting talks with emissaries of the Tunisian government, we are going to visit Tunis in the months to come.
10 minutes to answer 10 key questions and get a quotation!
Enhancing Business Lines, launching “Business Practices”
Pentalog is getting ready to improve its commercial organization and production by strengthening business lines (Information System, BPO and Embedded Systems) through professional practices.
We will shortly begin identifying the people who have sufficient professional expertise. These people will hold the rank of project manager within our organization. But their experience will enable them to hold the function of “Head of Practice”.
At present, the practices envisaged for the IS BL and BPO are:
- banking
- telecom
- tourism
- industry
- e-commerce
- distribution and Supply Chain
- energy and commodities
In Embedded Systems, we have already identified several practices:
- telecom
- consumer goods (excluding telecoms)
- aeronautics and defense
- automotive
These collaborators will have to design Pentalog’s offers for each sector. In fact, we have noticed that our broad-based company has reached its limits while we already have numerous specialized services that we could emphasize and develop in order to better meet the needs of each of our clients. Among Pentalog’s clients there are many European and world leaders: Société Générale, Orange, ST-Ericsson, Parrot, Altadis Imperial Tobacco, LHS-Ericsson, Ubisoft etc. Let us recall that an average Pentalog project mobilizes around 15 people, while the largest ones involve over 50.
Thus, our offer will catch up with that of the Indian giants who have been offering multiple specialized services for a long time. In the European nearshore, only two or three of us will have such a wide range of professional skills and such strength.
Why choose Pentalog for outsourcing your business processes (BPO)?
This is a question that is often asked when we present our BPO (business process outsourcing) offer.
The main arguments that I highlight are the following:
Recognized expertise in managing outsourced projects since 2000.
Development teams capable of taking full advantage of automation and information processing support technologies: see our IS (Information Systems) and ES (Embedded Systems) offers.
Perfect knowledge of the market context of each country and ability to advise the client as to the outsourcing process (advantages, limitations)
Highly standardized human production methods meeting high quality demands, while offering numerous career opportunities.
Young employees, both in age and mind, who show responsiveness, enthusiasm and an ability for innovation.
And also an experienced management team offering moderation and realism.
Don’t hesitate to take a look at our success stories and contact us so that we may study your requirements and find the most appropriate solution together.
Pentalog is the only company to offer a catalog of its ongoing services in euros and dollars, updated 2 times per year.
Find nearly 130 services, available locally or offshore: developing information systems, business intelligence services, embedded systems, infrastructure, networking, telecom, outsourcing, hosting, BPO – business process outsourcing, …
Download it, save it and distribute it around you!
Pentalog forms a 50/50 joint-venture with Acticall Group
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?
Booming BPO business (information processing, data management and contact centre)
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).
New BPO business and upcoming website dedicated to ultra low costing
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.
. Pentalog is already on the European podium which includes Russia and the Maghreb and is also the leading French-speaking nearshore organization on the world market. Moreover, I would like to add that following some very interesting talks with emissaries of the Tunisian government, we are going to visit Tunis in the months to come.
But it’s also true that it’s sometimes difficult to make a company’s position evolve. 