Outsourcing on the move

From Lloyds of Lon­don insur­ance bro­kers using Xchang­ing Insur­ance soft­ware on their iPads to keep track of claims while away from their desks, to ser­vice provider Intermec’s prod­ucts for track­ing and man­ag­ing sup­ply chain assets and data, busi­ness process out­sourc­ing (BPO) has gone mobile.

As the IT out­sourc­ing mar­ket expands (by 7.8 per cent glob­al­ly in 2011), a recent Gart­ner report on mobile device man­age­ment (MDM) ser­vices pre­dicts that the aver­age MRC (month­ly recur­ring charge per mobile device) will increase through 2015, because of the “grow­ing accep­tance of MMS (man­aged mobil­i­ty ser­vices) by small and mid-size busi­ness­es and large enter­pris­es”.

Gart­ner esti­mates that world­wide there are 250 com­pa­nies pro­vid­ing IT and process out­sourc­ing ser­vices relat­ing to mobile devices, and it expects anoth­er 300 ven­dors to bring MMS to mar­ket dur­ing the next three years.

“Organ­i­sa­tions see that adding good mobile inter­faces to both core appli­ca­tions and impor­tant infor­ma­tion, such as research, will allow them to inter­act on the go, in a much more engaged man­ner,” says Cathy Torn­bohm, research direc­tor at Gart­ner.

The util­i­ty sec­tor is increas­ing­ly using mobile device man­age­ment for field-work­ers to send data back to head office

“This could be from some­thing as mun­dane as  approv­ing an invoice in almost real time – thus ben­e­fit­ing the busi­ness by allow­ing it to choose whether to cap­i­talise on nego­ti­at­ed dis­counts or keep hold of its cash – to an impor­tant approval from senior man­age­ment of a hir­ing req­ui­si­tion. Organ­i­sa­tions may also want to cap­i­talise on the cur­rent trend to use ana­lyt­ics to bet­ter effect and their big data mobile access can facil­i­tate quick­er, if not bet­ter, deci­sion-mak­ing.”

Ms Torn­bohm says this trend is lead­ing to good oppor­tu­ni­ties for mobile ser­vices firms and the range of ser­vices now on offer bears her out. Ven­dors such as Mobile­Iron and Air­Watch offer vari­a­tions of mobile device man­age­ment, Sky­nax, Intermec’s Mobil­i­ty Man­age­ment Sys­tem puts hand- held devices at the fore­front of logis­tics data-gath­er­ing and tools such as bar-code print­ing and RFID-scan­ning, while mobile apps like Glob­al­Sourcer by Head­stream Advi­so­ry help busi­ness­es track down out­sourc­ing ven­dors.

Yet Gart­ner reports that adop­tion of MDM ser­vices may be slow for a vari­ety of rea­sons, includ­ing that “ser­vice providers strug­gle to artic­u­late the val­ue of MDM”, “com­pa­nies have con­cerns about outsourcing…as this might involve sen­si­tive cor­po­rate data resid­ing out­side the cor­po­rate net­work” and that “invest­ment by enter­pris­es in MMS will not nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to cost reduc­tions”.

John O’Brien, research direc­tor at Tech­Mar­ketView, argues that, while Lloyds of Lon­don bro­kers car­ry­ing net­worked iPads rather than huge bun­dles of paper out­side the office is a sym­bol of progress (of sorts), use of mobile devices to man­age BPO is still very much in its infan­cy.

“While it’s absolute­ly at the begin­ning, it is start­ing to grow,” he says. “The util­i­ty sec­tor, for exam­ple, is increas­ing­ly using mobile device man­age­ment for field-work­ers, so they can send time sheets and oth­er data direct­ly back to head office sys­tems, which improves the effi­cien­cy of the process­es them­selves. I expect to see increas­ing mobile man­age­ment usage in areas like that.”

Tech­nol­o­gy ser­vices and out­sourc­ing com­pa­ny Accen­ture has devel­oped a por­tal, the BPO Nav­i­ga­tor, which it describes as “a cen­tral, one-stop online por­tal that pro­vides both clients and Accen­ture teams with real-time vis­i­bil­i­ty into busi­ness, includ­ing oper­a­tional per­for­mance and crit­i­cal busi­ness data on any device with inter­net access”.

“The dash­board pro­vides both a snap­shot and detailed view of busi­ness per­for­mance, show­ing met­ric thresh­olds and trends, com­par­ing data across busi­ness unit or coun­try,” says Charles Suther­land, Accenture’s BPO growth and strat­e­gy lead. “By lever­ag­ing ana­lyt­ics, the tool derives action­able insights from the data through sta­tis­tics, fore­cast­ing and mod­el­ling, lead­ing to bet­ter busi­ness deci­sions and out­comes.”

From Lloyds of London insurance brokers using Xchanging Insurance software on their iPads to keep track of claims while away from their desks, to service provider Intermec’s products for tracking and managing supply chain assets and data, business process outsourcing (BPO) has gone mobile.