India’s first Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) facility in jail will become a reality with the Andhra Pradesh government Wednesday giving its nod to the proposal. As part of jail reforms and to provide income generating opportunities to prisoners, the government decided to allow private industry including BPOs to set up their units in prisons.

Chief minister K. Rosaiah gave the green signal for the proposal at a meeting called to discuss a draft bill to use the services of convicts for social activities. Home minister P. Sabita Indra Reddy told reporters that the chief minister had cleared the proposal, enabling India’s first BPO unit to come up in Hyderabad’s Cherlapally Central Jail.

Under the public-private partnership, Bangalore-based Radiant Info Systems Ltd will set up the unit, to be manned by educated convicts. Out of 2,000 inmates in the Cherlapally jail, the authorities will shortlist 250 convicts. They will be trained for few months before the BPO starts its operations. (more…)

Hinduja Global Solutions (HGSL), a business process outsourcing company and part of the Hinduja Group, today announced that it had bought UK-based customer relationship management company Careline Services. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition will act as a launch pad for HGSL to enter the UK and European markets and will also be a platform to cross-sell its global delivery model to Careline’s European clients. Ashok P Hinduja, chairman of Hinduja Group India, recently told Business Standard that the group was looking to acquire BPO units in the UK and the US as part of its plan to deploy idle cash. HGSL had a cash and cash-equivalents of Rs 648 crore as of March 31, 2010, of which Rs 577 crore was with Pacific Horizon, a wholly-owned Mauritian subsidiary.
 
Hinduja had said that the BPO deals were expected to be finalised over the next few weeks. While the BPO outfit in the UK, with which the Hindujas were in talks, had sales of around 25 million pound (around Rs 170 crore), the US company had revenues of $250 million (around Rs 1,000 crore). (more…)

Infosys BPO announced that it has received two awards at SSON’s (Shared Services & Outsourcing Network) 2010 North American Shared Services Excellence Awards.
Infosys BPO along with its clients McClatchy and P&G were adjudged winner and runner-up and respectively under the category ‘Best New Outsourced Services Delivery (under 3 years)’ at the award ceremony held at Orlando, Florida.

SSON’s annual Shared Services Excellence Awards honour, recognize and promote both captive and outsourced shared services that demonstrate winning practices. These awards are the industry’s benchmark in terms of best practice and business excellence. The parameters for selection included strategy, people, culture and change management, innovation, automation, relationship management and customer service, governance and future strategic direction.

Patrick Arlequeeuw, Vice President R&D, Product Supply and Customer Business Development Services for P&G’s Global Business Services commented, “This is a recognition we can be proud of. I know that the participating companies are top-notch in their fields and the selection process is very competitive.” (more…)

Indian BPO firms are tuning in to a global delivery model — doing the right thing from the right geography — as value creation for customers take primacy over cost arbitrage, political pressures mount against offshoring and new offshoring destinations gain traction.

With newer rivals like Philippines snaring 70% of new contact centre businesses and onshore BPOs in Brazil and other Latin American locations picking up steam, local vendors are being forced to set up global delivery centres, or look at near-shore options.

Wipro BPO’s senior vice-president Ashutosh Vaidya says they have set up 15 overseas delivery centres and parked 3,000 people there to neutralise near-shoring by global outsourcing firms like Accenture and CapGemini. The latter, in fact, has a major hub in Guatemala City, which also houses delivery centres by Indian BPO firm 24X7 Customer.

To boot, TCS Iberoamerica employs over 6,000 people in Latin America across eight centres spanning Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. “If you are going to be a significant player, you will have to have near-shore as well as offshore solutions”, says Deepak Patel, CEO, Aditya Birla Minacs.  Full News

Insurance regulator IRDA today said it has selected Sparsh BPO Services for providing call centre services to handle grievances of
customers.

“Based on detailed scrutiny of the commercial proposals submitted by the shortlisted BPO firms… Sparsh BPO Services Ltd has been selected as an implementing agency for setting up of IRDA Grievance Call Centre,” IRDA said in a statement.

Earlier, IRDA had shortlisted three entities for the grievance call centre — Sparsh BPO, Mahindra Satyam and Vcustomer.

The call centre is envisaged to be a true alternate channel for insurance consumers, offering comprehensive tele-functionalities (both manual and IVR) to all insurance consumer segments. (more…)

IT firm MphasiS on Tuesday announced the launch of a 500-seater Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centre in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. To start with, the centre will provide services to telecom operator Idea Cellular. The Raipur centre, to be part of a network of centres in the region, would work closely with MphasiS’s Indore Hub, the company said in a statement.

MphasiS, an HP Group company, provides applications services, remote management services and BPO services to clients in financial services, healthcare, government, communications, transportation, consumer and retail industries.

The BPO centre, which would eventually house over 500 employees, aims to expand exponentially and create job opportunities in the state, it added.

“This centre is a reflection of our commitment to inclusive growth, and leveraging talent available in the state,” MphasiS BPO Business Unit President Raj Patil said. Source

Bangalore-based Infosys BPO has picked up this year’s North American Shared Services Excellence Award for best new outsourced services, for handling advertising production work of its client McClatchy’s newspapers that include Kansas City Star. The award was jointly awarded to Infosys BPO and McClatchy, which also publishes Miami Herald.

The advertising outsourcing deal was signed in 2008. Infosys BPO created quite a buzz at the awards, presented at Orlando, Florida, on March 26, when it also picked up the runner-up award in the same category. The runner-up title was given away jointly to Infosys and another of its clients Procter & Gamble.

“This is a significant honour, given that the awards are open to end-users as well as captives and outsourced shared services organisations from all countries,” Infosys BPO’s COO Ritesh Idnani said in a statement released today. (more…)

The IT world is optimistic on gains recorded so far and that is translating into a windfall for techies. Infosys Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Kris Gopalakrishnan expressed confidence that the growth in Information Technology industry has returned. Addressing a conference hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at Thiruvanthapuram in southern Kerala on Thursday Gopalakrishnan mentioned that Infosys is committed to hire 30,000 professionals by the end of the current financial year.

“Growth has come back into the industry. We are all scrambling to recruit. Infosys alone is committed to recruit 30,000 people this financial year. We have made campus visits and campus offers. So yes, growth has come back to the IT industry,” said Kris Gopalakrishnan.

He cited that the country’’s apex forum for IT and software industry, National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), has  projected a 16 percent growth in the BPO industry. (more…)

Som Mittal, President of National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has said outsourcing business in India has
witnessed more than nine times growth, from 1.6 billion dollars to 14.7 billion dollars in the last decade.

Addressing media persons here on Wednesday, Mittal said: “In this last decade, from 1.6 billion, we rose to 14.7 dollars.” He further said that India’s back-office outsourcing business would post a growth of 15 to 16 per cent in 2010 to March 2011 on growing demands from overseas clients. There is a growth in the employment sector as well, as far as the BPO industry is concerned.

He pointed out that even two-tier cities have become the hub of IT industry and software development. “Today, BPO industry is in 50 cities and towns. I think that’s very significant, so, a large part of the business did come from top six-seven cities, but the fact that they are already in 50 cities, is very significant,” he added. (more…)

Kofax plc /quotes/comstock/23s!e:kfx (UK:KFX 235.00, -5.00, -2.08%) , the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced it will provide a leading business process outsourcing (BPO) firm in Brazil with a document capture solution to be used in servicing a large Brazilian government client. The value of the contract to Kofax exceeds $1.3 million.

The firm will implement Kofax Capture, Kofax Transformation Modules and Kofax Monitor to capture and classify approximately 230 million images scanned from a wide variety of tax forms, court cases, and other legal documents it receives annually from its government client. The software will enable more than 100 unstructured document types to be automatically identified and classified. As a result, the government agency will improve access to documents, reduce manual tasks and be able to better respond to the needs of its constituencies.

“BPOs and public sector agencies tasked with processing a high volume of unstructured documents are investing in document capture solutions to take the costs and labor out of paper-intensive business processes,” said Alan Kerr, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Kofax. “We provide compelling value for our customers by enabling them to deliver better data quality, improve customer service levels and generate a fast, proven return on their investment.” (more…)