Offshore Outsourcing Vendors, Customers, and Advisors: They Should Know Better
Offshore Outsourcing Contractual Conflicts Never Payoff. Today’s Dallas News included an interesting article on the State of Texas’ seven-year, $863M IT offshore outsourcing contract with IBM. What makes it interesting? The doom and gloom comments by the esteemed outsourcing advisors, Equaterra and Sierra Systems Group. “In the final analysis, the current relationship is not sustainable,” the advisors say. Then they suggest...
Offshore Outsourcing Management – What’s the Problem?
Managing Offshore Outsourcing Is More Than It Seems Offshore outsourcing vendors would make it seem easy: after transitioning services to India, the Philippines, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaysia, or your location du jour, it’s all smooth sailing. A few conference calls each week, an occasional traveling entourage of senior vendor personnel coming to your office, and web conferences. A simple vendor management recipe. For disaster. Read More →
An Outsourcing Vendor’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan
Jamaican hurricanes, Costa Rican volcanoes, Philippine political coups, Indian taxi strikes, Chinese government-operated firewalls, Canadian blizzards, and the legendary American backhoe operating behind your data center are dangers to your business when you outsource to offshore locations. Realistically speaking, geologic, social, political and weather-related disasters his every city of every country. Granted, some events are more or less likely...
Another Tale from “When You Don’t Have Vendor Management Governance”
As related to us by a reader. Picture this: Your company has outsourced customer service for some products, but not all products. You have a single vendor with over 1,000 seats dedicated to your operation. These seats are located in several centers located in the USA (for reasons not important to this story). Your vendor management team is made-up of a single person. This person coordinates five different programs, handles contractual issues,...
In the Absence of Outsoucing Governance or Vendor Management
A funny story told to us by an employee of a major US company (which we’ll call XYZ) with thousands of outsourced call center seats (domestic and international): XYZ has two call center programs. One is a major inbound customer service program and the other is a small (about 45 agents) complex inbound/outbound marketing programs that focus on driving customer loyalty and create a significant revenue lift. XYZ’s marketing and customer...
Vendor Managers Can Satisfy Internal Stakeholders
Before outsourcing, internal operations teams usually spend significant effort appeasing senior management by explaining every reason why deviations from performance were outside their control. Marketing launched a new campaign. IT’s servers were slow. The telecommunication vendor’s T1 was hit by a backhoe. The competitor launched a misleading campaign. The weather shutdown deliveries in Chicago. Well, have you noticed the change in...
Removing Key Vendor Personnel in Outsourcing Relationships
Dealing with under-performing or culturally incompatible vendor personnel is one of the most delicate matters facing vendor managers. Certain vendor personnel are critical to operational success. When they don’t deliver, performance deteriorates. When friction or distrust develops, relationships go sour and communication doesn’t freely flow. Frankly, it’s an awkward situation. The problem is that you’ve outsourced your...
Managing an Outsourcing Vendor’s Financial Instability
One of the principle concerns of any vendor manager is monitoring your outsourcing vendor’s financial instability. Witness the recent failure of Axium, Hollywood’s payroll vendor and owner of Ensemble Chimes Global, previously one of the leading managed services providers of contract labor. When Axium filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, Hollywood clients and a wide variety of their vendor management system clients (which included Fortune #3...
Vendors or Partners?
Phil Fersht, AMR’s outsourcing guru, opened an interesting can of worms today with his blog entry, Is your outsourcing vendor really your partner? There’s a good conversation, with everyone agreeing that a good relationship is essential, but some divergence over the motives of clients and vendors (oops, guess what our opinion is?). The thread of comments is definitely worth a read – and be sure to contribute your opinion. Read More →
When Roads Are Rocky: Dispute Resolution in Outsourcing Relationships
The valley of despair in an outsourcing relationship is when vendor managers consult with their legal counsels. Disputes that go “contractual” (the vendor management version of “nuclear”) can irreparably damage a relationship. Your job as a vendor manager or vendor account manager is to ensure the client-vendor relationship never sours. However, what do you do when it does? Today, we take a deeper look at dispute resolution. ...
