NASSCOM, Offshore, BPO, Industry

NASSCOM presents Indian IT and BPO industry's key highlights of operational excellence

According to a study released by Nasscom, a trade association of the software and services industry in India, clients are highly satisfied with their offshore BPO experiences with over 80% of customers satisfied with the performance of their offshore units. The study also revealed that performance has been the result of capable people, not institutionalized practices and rapidly evolving client focus will place increasing pressure on offshore units. These three broad trends were revealed based on the data gathered from over 30 leading captives and third-party providers.

The study, Operational Excellence: The Next Frontier in Offshoring by McKinsey & Company, is in continuation to the third Nasscom-McKinsey Report that highlighted India’s potential to realize $60 billion in exports from these industries and operational excellence as one of the imperatives for achieving this potential.

Conducted over the last 12 months, the assessment involved working closely with leading companies to develop unique operational excellence frameworks - Process 360° for BPOs, and Project 360° for IT services companies. These frameworks are one of the first operational excellence tools developed explicitly for offshore centers. They collate inputs from all stakeholders–clients from global corporations in the originating countries, engineers/associates, operations managers and senior executives at remote centers.

Process 360° covered 162 processes and surveyed over 4800 respondents across 6 groups – basic voice processes, specialized voice processes, basic data processes, specialized data processes, rules-based decisioning processes, knowledge services and, research and analytics.

Project 360° included 58 projects and garnered responses from about 400 respondents across 3 groups – application development, application maintenance, and packaged software and implementation support.

The data gathered from over 30 leading captives and third-party providers reveals three broad trends:

• Clients are highly satisfied with their offshore experiences – over 80% of customers are satisfied with the performance of their offshore units.
• Performance has been the result of capable people, not institutionalized practices.
• Rapidly evolving customer expectations will place increasing pressure on offshore units.

Concluded Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM, “India has clearly been the market leader with over 50 percent of the global market in offshore services. As the market leader, it is imperative that we continue to set standards for the global industry. By focusing on operational excellence as the next frontier in offshoring we can realize our aspiration of achieving US $ 60 billion in export revenues by 2010. As the report says – even greater things must lie beyond.”