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…)

Shimoga, the home town of chief minister BS Yeddyurappa and BJP state unit president KS Eshwarappa, is set to become a business process outsourcing (BPO) hub soon.

David Andrews, CEO of Xchanging, who is part of Cameron’s business delegation, signed the MoU with the state owned enterprise KEONICS managing director Harikumar Jha, to develop a special economic zone (SEZ) in Shimoga, in the presence of Yeddyurappa, on Wednesday, Jul 28. This global business processor, will develop the new SEZ with a state-of-the-art processing centre on six acres of land.

It will thus be among the first multinational firms to set up a centre in a tier-3 location in the country. The BPO will have an initial capacity of 1,000 people with an option to scale up to a 2,000-seat centre

“We have received tremendous cooperation from the state government. We are looking forward to expand our business in the state,” Andrews said. (more…)

With business process outsourcing (BPO) segment witnessing de-growth for the past two years, HCL Technologies has decided to transform it into business plus service platform and call it Business Services. This was disclosed by Vineet Nayar, Chief Executive Officer, in an interview with this correspondent over telephone on Thursday.

Under this, the company would offer integrated platform along with people as a business package and charge the clients on a per transaction basis. As a step towards this, HCL Technologies, had acquired a leading U.K.-based BPO provider Liberata Financial Services (LFS) to provide comprehensive end-to-end administration and customer services for the life insurance and pension industry. The company’s insurance practice would be strengthened by LFS’ core capability to manage complex transactions. It had decided to invest $30 million in eight quarters in transforming the BPO business.

Mr. Nayar said the company was also planning to set up capability centres in Chennai, Bangalore, Noida and Hyderabad. These centres would act as a special force to create a global capability to compete with the skill sets in the U.S. and the U.K in the SAP and Oracle platforms. It proposed to recruit 1,000 engineering graduates with skill sets in SAP and Oracle platforms. They would be trained by capabilities consultants of HCL, Axon of the U.K. (more…)

India’s second largest software firm, Infosys Technologies could potentially overtake information technology (IT) services in overall revenue. Infosys BPO currently contributes to around 5 percent of the firm’s total revenue, said Chief Executive S. Gopalakrishnan. “If you take BPO (business process outsourcing) alone, it can be even bigger than IT services because that addresses something like 15-20 percent of spend for our client organization, whereas IT typically addresses 2-5 percent of expenditure for our clients,” reports Surabhi Agarwal & K. Raghu from The Mint.

Ritesh M. Idnani, a member of Infosys BPO’s Executive Council and its chief operating officer said that Infosys BPO is aiming to quadruple its revenue to $1 billion (Rs4,730 crore) in three years, riding a rebound in demand for outsourcing. For the financial year 2009-10, it reported a revenue of Rs1,127 crore while Infosys Technologies’ turnover was Rs22,742 crore.

A significant growth is possible in infrastructure management and systems integration, which now contribute only 7-8 percent of the total revenue. While Infosys BPO continue to target verticals such as finance and accounting and human resource outsourcing– low-hanging fruits for the industry Idnani said there is a new focus around areas such as warranty support and digital commerce. Around 50 percent of the company’s deal pipeline still comprises of finance and accounting-related contracts. (more…)

How does the hiring process in BPOs differ from that in other industries?

In the BPO industry, we typically hire a large number of service professionals at one time.For example, after receiving a new client agreement, we could be faced with a hiring need of hundreds of service professionals.Additionally, we need to ramp our programs quickly, so not only do we need to find a lot of qualified professionals, but we need to find them fast.The specific skill sets that we typically look for are candidates who have a strong command of the English language, combines with technical knowledge and, in some cases, IT experience.

What are the various advantages of working in a BPO?

The BPO industry offers many advantages. For one, the work schedule affords individuals the opportunity to be with their families or study during the day, and work in the evening. In addition, service professionals are exposed to many leading global brands, and can quickly become well-versed in the industry and/or technology of the client they support. Stream also provides our service professionals excellent career growth opportunities.In addition to custom-designed classroom and on-the-job training, Stream offers many interesting career development opportunities, enabling service professionals to assume new skills and leadership responsibilities. In fact, the majority of our team managers today began their careers providing customer service or technical support to our clients, while others have moved into new positions in human resources, scheduling, training and quality. (more…)