Now WNS forays into platform-based BPO
SOURCE: EconomicTimes
DATE: May 2nd, 2008
Mohit Soapbox:
The Platform BPO term comes up again. Essentially the model refers to a service offering where the IT platform for delivery is owned by the vendor and the services are provided plus the platform. Similar to payroll services by ADP. This model is an interesting model and so far vendor with both IT and BPO practices have made a lot of noise around that. WNS is one of the first pure play companies to do that. What will be interesting to see is that how do companies make this work and price. I have seen limited success in a joint IT/BPO initiatives with clients even if it is the same vendor. Also given that the platform BPO development requires an investment. If a client is willing to fund the investment great but now in the current global economic environment not too many clients will be willing to ‘try’ out something new.
ARTICLE
India’s second-largest third party BPO firm, WNS Global Services, has decided to carve out a separate group from its existing services called the ‘business technology group’ and has moved its chief information officer, Atul Davda, to head the effort.
The move will represent the first serious foray by a pure-play BPO firm into ‘platform-based BPO services’, business processes that are run on a unified technology platform owned by the vendor rather than on separate client platforms.
The subject of platform-based BPO has been slightly controversial with IT firms favouring it because of their natural bias towards building and owning technology and a few pure-play BPO firms opposing it.
The contention of the pure-play BPOs has been that clients would not want to switch to a standardised platform from their existing platforms. WNS Group CEO Neeraj Bhargava, however, said the company intended to launch the platform-based offering shortly in the market as an ‘external-facing initiative’ and eventually, also report its numbers under a separate head.
“Already we get 25% of our revenues from services that have a technology component. What we are doing now is consolidating it under a single umbrella and offering to customers.
We intend to get very aggressive with platform-based BPO,” he said. Customers were also beginning to see the value of standardisation as they made global acquisitions and each firm came with its own platform and set of practices, making it harder to integrate, Mr Bhargava said.
The company has also ventured closer to IT turf with a set of tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP) that are offered on a licence-fee basis to customers. The intention is not to compete with the likes of Satyam and other IT companies, but to offer tools that enable BPO, he said.
These tools help to convert data in different formats to a single standard form that can then be used in running processes such as payroll and HR on platforms like SAP.
WNS, which started off as a British Airways captive, inherited JADE, an end-to-end passenger accounting platform from it. It also inherited a few more platforms through its acquisitions over the years as well as a document indexing platform for digital loan management from its acquisition of Trinity, and last year, an auto-claims management platform from its acquisition of Flovate Technologies.
In addition to these, the ‘business technology group’ headed by Mr Davda will work on developing more platform-based BPO offerings. The pricing for platform-based BPO can be transaction-based rather based on the number of seats that dedicated to a process.
According to Sudin Apte, senior analyst and country head - India, Forrester Research, BPO firms can de-link revenues from manpower only through such initiatives. “This has to be way the forward given the challenges of the appreciating rupee and wage inflation,” he said.
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply