Krakow Bpo Destination
Why Krakow for Business Process Outsourcing?
Empowering your Business
Introduction
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has become a major driver of performance in business today. Companies of all sizes and in all industries are realising the many benefits of transferring non-core activities to specialist service providers. In the drive to increase profits and productivity it’s important to focus on core operations and value creation.
With non-core activities taking up valuable management time it can be difficult to stay competitive, more so in the current economic environment. Working in a collaborative partnership to ensure successful outsourcing and releasing your team members from non-core activities can significantly reduce your operational costs. This position is best summarized as ‘do what you do best and outsource the rest’. Outsourcing is not about what you can subtract from a business. It’s about what you can add.
Leo Blennerhassett, Managing Director of Accenture Ireland, the Irish arm of the global leader in BPO, was recently quoted in an interview: ‘The trend to outsourcing is real and companies are looking to improve their overall health by transforming their business on both a strategic; tactical level’. Research by Gartner, the world’s leading research firm, indicates that BPO will achieve double digit growth in the coming years as more and more organizations, of all sizes and from all industries, turn to BPO providers to reduce costs, drive revenue, enhance customer service and eliminate non-core activities from within their firms.
Outsourcing is now an essential tool for every organization. Ongoing research from Accenture into the characteristics of high performance, has found that outsourcing is one of the key enablers of high-performance businesses and governments. More and more decision makers are turning to outsourcing to help them elevate their organizations’ performance, driving value into their enterprises and driving cost out. Evolving Outsourcing’s services touch an ever broadening range of industries and business processes. We are transforming existing operations for our clients, making them smarter, faster and cheaper.
Why outsource? What are the benefits to my business?
Substantial cost savings, both in terms of labour ; capital: o The concept of fully loaded cost is central to BPO. In many cases clients will only think of the cost of labour when attempting to establish the cost to the business of having Person X performing tasks A, B; C in-house. However, it is critical to factor in the costs associated with hardware, software, furniture, stationary, salary contributions, management, training and so forth in order to accurately understand the true cost of this person to the organization i. . the fully loaded cost. By partnering with a specialist BPO provider you eliminate the need to recruit ; train new employees as well as cutting down on administration; HR management costs. Acquiring 3rd party expertise by partnering with specialist service providers:
As we head into what has become known as the 3rd Generation of Outsourcing, the emphasis has long shifted from pure cost reduction to performance improvement. BPO providers are specialists at the services they provide and, as such, can deliver improved service quality to our clients’ customers.
Ability to focus on core competencies
By allowing your BPO partner to handle some or all of your non-core activities, your own in-house team can refocus all time, energy and resources on activities directly linked to your top line. In the current climate this is particularly important as the need to have all team members focused on sales & revenue has never been greater. Culture of continual improvement: o The idea of continual improvement is central to BPO. BPO providers ought to practice what they preach and be constantly seeking to refine & improve business processes for existing clients leading to continuous and increased gains for client partners.
Increased market flexibility & reduced time-to-market
By partnering with a BPO provider, firms enable themselves to become leaner, more dynamic and more agile. BPO providers allow client firms to scale quickly in response to increased demand and/or new services/products or promotional campaigns. This is imperative in today’s economic climate Factors to Consider when choosing an Outsourcing location
There are many offshore destinations to which a company can outsource its business processes and there are even more variables which must be considered when choosing the right destination for your company and your specific requirements. Among the most pertinent considerations are: the availability of resources, the quality of those resources and the accompanying risk. While it should never be the single determining factor, price and subsequent cost savings obviously need to be closely examined and clearly understood.
Cost Savings
Choosing a location for your BPO requirements is largely a question of risk versus reward.
Although it might be easier to manage a relationship with a local company this will not provide the financial advantages that outsourcing to an emerging market can generate, where labour and other non-labour costs are significantly lower. The BPO decision is not purely a lowest cost decision. Practical considerations such as geographic proximity, time difference and cultural similarities are integral to selecting the appropriate BPO location. Locations such as India; China invariably win the lowest cost element of any selection process.
However, outsourcing is now as much about process enhancement and customer service improvement as it is about cost. With this in mind, locations regarded as closer to the ‘west’- geographically, culturally and the way in which they do business – have made huge leaps forward as BPO destinations in recent years. The main beneficiary of this move has been Central; Eastern Europe (CEE) and Poland in particular. In several cases, Indian BPO organizations have themselves followed this trend by establishing their own presence in the CEE region. Availability of Resources:
Poland boasts the largest number of educational centres and produces the largest number of graduates approximately 40,000 per annum in terms of ICT graduates alone of all countries in the CEE region. Evolving Outsourcing is headquartered in Krakow which is commonly regarded as the ‘Oxford of Poland’ and the ‘Silicon Valley of Poland’ on account of the number and quality of universities and graduates in the city. However, this fact alone is of no use to your organization if you are not properly positioned to recruit the best people to your BPO project team.
This is why it is imperative to understand how a BPO service provider intends to recruit people to your particular project team. Evolving Outsourcing is part of the Evolving Group, which also comprises Evolving Recruitment and Evolving Training. Evolving Recruitment is a full-service HR company with clients ranging from blue chip multi-nationals to SMEs. Therefore, we are not only in a position to handle your outsourced business processes but are also perfectly positioned, in the first instance, to recruit and train the best possible staff for your particular project.
This is a crucial component when choosing a BPO partner. Quality of Resources: It is imperative to choose a BPO location in which a large pool of highly-qualified, multi-lingual graduates is being produced every year. Ideally the destination city should have a reputation not only for producing a high number of excellent graduates each year but these graduates should come from a wide range of areas such as engineering, medicine, economics, IT, languages, administration ; management. 07 Cultural Similarity:
It is important to choose a BPO location which is culturally aligned to your own country and/or the country or countries in which the majority of your clients are located. There should be cultural and linguistic similarities in order to prevent the perception of a disconnect emerging. There is an abundance of anecdotal evidence to this effect. Evolving Outsourcing is headquartered in Krakow, Poland, a country which is culturally and linguistically aligned to the western business world. Risks: Choosing a location for your BPO requirements is largely a question of risk versus reward.
The ‘rewards’ of BPO include significant cost savings, improved process performance (further fuelling bottom ; top line) and an enhanced experience for all your clients from partnering with specialist service providers. The ‘risks’ are primarily associated with the perceived loss of control which accompanies a move into BPO by an organization. This is a natural reaction for organizations using BPO service providers, particularly for the first time. Bearing this in mind, BPO providers truly committed to partnership- and collaborationbased relationships need to work with the client partner to allay these fears.
At Evolving Outsourcing, we spend a significant amount of time discussing this with client partners. We help organizations through this initial period of tentativeness in three key ways.
- Show the value of recommendations and explain clearly how their implementation will improve the client’s particular situation.
- Ensure the client clearly understands exactly what the proposed solution is going to achieve i. e. to what point are we trying to get?
- Ensure client partners understand and feel that they ‘own’ the proposed solution and are fully committed to implementing it.
Striking a balance between risk & reward is key to choosing a BPO partner and location. At Evolving Group, when it came to choosing a location for our Outsourcing delivery centre we felt that Krakow satisfied our requirements in that it is a relatively low cost/low risk location. When speaking with prospective client partners we use two main points to elucidate the low risk nature of partnering with Evolving; Firstly, we have found that the average skills of Polish employees tend to be significantly higher than many other countries.
Whether it is an IT specialist, a web/graphic designer or a Finance & Accounting professional, we are constantly impressed by both the technical skills and the ‘can do’ attitude they display. Secondly, we facilitate our clients by offering to initiate our BPO relationship using a Pilot Project for a short, predetermined period of time. This allows organizations to work with us and see the benefits of what we can bring to their business without the up-front commitment of a longer contract. Naturally, the single most important aspect of selecting a BPO location is choosing the right provider with whom to partner.
At Evolving Outsourcing, we provide costsaving & performance-enhancing outsourcing services to companies of all sizes in all markets/industries. Headquartered in Krakow, Poland, our proximity to some of the country’s most renowned universities gives us excellent access to a superior pool of talented and highly-educated, multi-lingual graduates allowing us to provide our client partners with world class business process outsourcing services at a much lower price than can be achieved in the Ireland or the UK.
Why Krakow?
At Evolving Outsourcing, we took the strategic ; tactical decision to locate our delivery centre in Krakow as we feel it provides us and our client partners with a very strong ‘best of both worlds’ scenario. We can offer significant cost savings ; performance improvements from a strategically located city which is renowned for producing world class graduates (Krakow has 7 universities). 09 Tholons, (www. tholons. om) a leading global strategic advisory firm focused on the outsourcing industry recently ranked Krakow the 5th most attractive city in the world and 1st in Europe for outsourcing in their report – ‘Top 50 Emerging Outsourcing Cities’. In assessing the cities’ levels of attractiveness as an outsourcing destination, the research examined such criteria as the quality and availability of human resources, education levels, costs of running a business, business-related risks, investment climate, infrastructure and quality of life.
Many of the world’s leading outsourcing and technology companies have already set up operations in Krakow: IBM Outsourcing LogicaCMG General Electric HCL HP Cap Gemini Motorola Google Research Labs Hewitt In addition, the following firms already have ‘shared services’ centres in Krakow RR Donnelly Electrolux Bayer Shell Shared Services Centre Philip Morris Outsourcing Centre Hitachi E;Y BP Shared Services Centre Indesit KPMG International Paper Lufthansa Evolving Group
Our starting point at Evolving Outsourcing is to ask ourselves ‘what value can we bring to this company? ‘ We are not interested in ‘elbowing’ our way into an organization in order to ‘sell our wares’. In every first meeting with a potential client we ask the questions ‘what can we do for you? How can we help you? ‘ We listen. We are in the business of consulting, never hard selling. Business Process Outsourcing is a complex undertaking and it is vital to choose the appropriate partner for your firm and your objectives.
In the case of Evolving Outsourcing, we provide our services from our state-of-the-art delivery centre in Krakow, Poland. In BPO speak, Krakow is considered a nearshoring location as opposed to an offshoring location. Nearshoring locations like Krakow are characterized by relative proximity to the client country (i. e. Ireland) in terms of geography, time zone, culture (values, behaviours ; attitudes) and language (incl. accent). Examples of offshoring locations include India and China. The nearshore Vs offshore decision has significant implications for the SME business owner.
Practical implications such as a monthly or bi-monthly site visit are entirely feasible from a time ; cost perspective if we are speaking about a nearshoring location such as Krakow. A business owner can fly from Dublin, Cork or Shannon on a weekday morning, be collected at the airport, brought to the delivery centre for the day and be back at their office 24-48 hours later. This is simply not possible with an offshoring destination such as India. All of these practical considerations must also be added to the mix when engaging in a BPO decision-making process.
Practical considerations such as the above-mentioned site visits coupled with the communication advantages of a one hour time difference and cultural and linguistic similarities must be carefully weighed against a purely lowest cost-driven decision i. e. offshoring locations such as India and China, as well as emerging destinations like the Philippines, will inevitably win the battle from a purely low cost perspective. Evolving Outsourcing is part of Evolving Group, a multi-lingual, full service HR Services, Training ; Outsourcing Company.
Supplying more than 300 companies in over 15 countries with Outsourcing, Recruitment and HR solutions. Our clients, ranging from large multinationals to small and medium size enterprises, are located throughout the EU, Canada and the Middle-East. 84% of our clients are involved in repeat business with us. Our Business Process Outsourcing solutions include Customer Interaction Management Solutions, Back Office Document ; Data Management Solutions, Finance ; Accounting Solutions, IT Support Solutions and Internet ; e-Commerce Outsourcing Solutions.
