The Government of Tamil Nadu is holding talks with various companies and colleges for setting up of Rural Business Process Outsourcing Centres, with an aim of taking the IT sector to rural areas. The government recently unveiled its highly ambitious Rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Policy, unveiling an incentive-based approach to encourage establishment of BPOs in rural areas.

“We are holding talks with several companies and engineering colleges as part of the process”, officials said. The government wanted the engineering colleges to offer training to the students so as to make them employable in BPO sector when they passed out as graduates.

 On setting up of the BPO centres in rural areas, officials beliave it will take some time, as the government was looking to bring BPO providers and entrepreneurs under one platform.

The officials job is to bring the entrepreneurs and companies on to one platform. Firstly, they have to finalise the companies that will provide employment and identify those entrepreneurs who are ready to provide basic infrastructure. Source

Educational Testing Service (ETS), the leading provider of education assessments and psychometric research, has awarded Accenture /quotes/comstock/13*!acn/quotes/nls/acn (ACN 36.70, -0.20, -0.54%) a seven-year, $160M contract extension to continue managing its end-to-end supply chain, under a business process outsourcing (BPO) agreement. The contract was signed in May 2010.

Under the agreement, which was entered originally in 2005, Accenture will continue to manage all aspects of ETS’ supply chain, including the printing, publishing, warehousing, distribution, tracking and shipping of tests and test materials to more than 10 million test takers in 160 countries every year. This allows ETS to continually improve the control, accuracy and integrity in its operations.

“Working with Accenture these past five years, we have saved millions of dollars in print, transportation and supply chain costs — savings that we have been able to pass on to our customers, while continuing to provide them world class service,” said Diane Bailey, Vice President Production and Logistics, ETS.

“We are privileged to have the opportunity to continue providing vital supply chain and customized BPO services to ETS’ global organization,” said Rob D’Avanzo, a managing director in Accenture’s Communications & High Tech group. “An efficient and simplified supply chain process will help ETS continue to achieve control and efficiency over its entire operation.” Source

The service industry’s contribution to the country’s gross domestic product is over 50 per cent. The sector is growing at 12 per cent per annum, well above the average GDP growth of 8 per cent. However, the shortage of executives with the right people skills has led Aegis, a BPO of the Essar group, to start the Institute of Customer Experience Management. It will train students in managing ‘customer experience’. The Indian Institute of Management, Indore is partnering Aegis to train students, as are COPC (USA) and SQ Centre (Singapore).

The institute will teach students for 15 months (out of which 11 months will be spent on campus and the rest in the industry). Says Aegis Global Academy President Subir Ghosh: “It is more of an approach from the customer’s point of view rather than an insider’s perspective.”
 
The trigger for such an institute, which Aegis claims is the first of its kind, came from the company trying to manage the life-cycle of its customers. “We try to make our business less transaction-based and more customer life-cycle oriented,” Ghosh says. The institute will lay stress on students aiming to service a customer through his life-cycle than just sell a service or product. (more…)

The Tamil Nadu government has unveiled a Rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) policy, adopting an incentive-based approach to encourage establishment of BPOs in rural areas. The new policy is an outcome of the success of rural BPO units in Sanasandiram Chennathur panchayat in Hosur block, three years ago.

“Tamil Nadu being a major Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Hub and with the ICT industry now expanding to Tier II, Tier III cities, and towns and indeed into villages in Tamil Nadu, it is indispensable to have a comprehensive Rural BPO policy to increase employment in the rural areas of state,” the state government’s order said.

The two forms of subsidy - capital and training — will be given to BPO units located in village panchayats. A BPO unit can avail itself of both categories of subsidy and may get a total of Rs 7.5 lakh.

The state Information Technology department, will play the role of a facilitator in exchanging information with the BPO industry. It will also help to find interested institutions, both educational and otherwise, which would want to partner with BPO units. (more…)

TCS BPO Services, the business process outsourcing arm of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has won six awards for outstanding HR leadership at Asia’s Best Employer Brand Awards 2010, in Singapore.

TCS BPO was nominated across six different speciality areas of HR excellence and was recognised among the frontrunners across Asia Pacific in all six of these categories, receiving the award for talent management, excellence in HR through technology, continuous innovation in HR strategy at work, innovation in recruitment, innovative retention strategy and excellence in training, the company said in a statement in Mumbai on Sunday.

“The entire industry has witnessed some difficult times during the last six to seven quarters, with the BPO sector facing its own unique set of challenges. Against this backdrop, receiving not one but six honors at Asia’s best employer brand awards 2010 bears testimony to our successes in talent acquisition, retention and development strategies, as well as innovation and technology adoption within our HR function,” TCS BPO Services’ Global Head, Abid Ali Neemuchwala, said.

TCS BPO Services had recently won the Best Employer Award at the BPO Excellence Awards 2009-2010 in Mumbai, it said. Source

A typical day for Archana, 29 and a mother of two, used to start with milking cows, cooking breakfast for her large joint-family, preparing lunch
for her husband, an insurance agent, and seeing him off to work. Rest of the day for the intermediate pass from Teekli village’s senior secondary school was more of the same: looking after the kids, doing chores, and sometimes, doing nothing. All that changed this March, when her village, about 30 km from Gurgaon, got its first BPO (business process outsourcing) centre, from Harva, an outsourcing company with a rural focus. Archana joined Harva as a process executive, on a salary of Rs 4,500 per month.

Today, Archana and 29 other women from Teekli transfer animal-census data of Haryana’s animal husbandry department from handwritten spreadsheets on to Microsoft Excel sheets on the computer. They enter book details for a large global online retailer. They do all this out of the village numberdar’s (registrar) under-construction two-storey house, which Harva has rented and remodelled as a BPO. It’s barebones. The walls are still the colour of cement. There’s a large table, rows of computers and plastic chairs — and nothing else. (more…)