Outsourcing Leadership - Product or Service >> Finance & Accounting Services

In order to effectively reduce costs, many companies are sending non-core functions offshore by either developing in-house Shared Service Centers or Outsourcing to a third party service provider. There are a variety of factors to consider when deciding whether to offshore functions; but there are just as many issues to take into account once you've made the decision.

It is imperative that the transition of work to the offshore location be accomplished in a cost effective and seamless fashion. Successfully doing so requires detailed planning, management and execution by a Work Migration Team. Alsbridge has developed a detailed Migration Methodology with a tailored approach to minimize the impact on the organization, maintain service quality, and ensure the success of the transition and migration.

Alsbridge has developed Migration Methodology that has a proven approach that can be customized to suit individual situations and focus on a seamless transition and migration, continuous performance improvements, and permanent lower processing costs.
Managing a successful offshore migration involves four phases:

Team Formulation
Identifying Migration Roles and Activities
Project Launch
Steady State and Release

This article will expound upon the four phases of successful transition and migration process that will minimize the impact of the transition while maximizing the ultimate return including cost savings, increased capabilities and process quality.

The Next Wave of Vendor Relationship Management

White Paper | Category: Transition & Governance IT Infrastructure & Applications Finance & Accounting Services...

What is the next great strategic sourcing practice for sustaining cost reductions and driving an efficient, competitive business in an environment that is constantly and dramatically changing? The answer is in how companies are addressing vendor relationship management and creating incentives that better leverage the capabilities of their current providers.

Most mature outsourced companies have created a concentrated multi-provider base, often with a handful of large sourcing vendors playing a major role in supporting the organization. These efforts have shifted business critical processes and value chain activities to outsourcing providers, creating new major provider relationships that are vital to operational continuity. Accelerated software delivery life cycles, vastly more sophisticated infrastructure virtualization, rapid pace of process and technology convergence, and the need to work seamlessly with offshore vendors have made effective vendor relationship management more demanding and more critical than ever before.

These companies are developing a new set of vendor relationship management capabilities by creating vendor "tiering" structures - including processes, governance mechanisms, and systems to manage sourcing vendors on a day-to-day basis over the full relationship lifecycle.

This paper describes the new vendor relationship management and service management environments, the challenges of extracting increased value through vendor management, and the vendor relationship management best practices leading edge companies are already applying in order to deliver maximum value from their multi-sourcing provider base.

F&A Outsourcing: Crafting a Sustainable Relationship

White Paper | Category: Strategy & Business Case Finance & Accounting Services Outsourcing

Finance and accounting business process outsourcing is a logical next step for chief financial officers and controllers considering the next phase of process improvement, especially in leading companies that have already elevated their internal processes to be "best in class." However, F&A outsourcing can be a complex process. Before you outsource your business processes, be sure to take into consideration several key questions that will help your organization successfully outsource your finance and accounting functions. CFOs considering BPO must ask themselves:

What are my sourcing objectives?
How do I decide which functions are outsourcing candidates?
If we make the decision to evaluate the options, how do we proceed from "deciding to decide" to the decision to the actual transformation?
Is the BPO trend sustainable and a permanent part of the business landscape?
If true, are there alternatives to outsourcing that will also achieve my objectives and how do they compare?
Is outsourcing the "last step" in the improvement evolution or simply another step along the journey?

What is clear is that there is no one perfect solution that meets all of a company’s goals for F&A outsourcing. A careful consideration of the strategic fit of all alternatives available within your "toolbox" is the wisest approach. In the final analysis, the "best in class" companies will likely have an optimal mix of offshoring, "near" shoring, "lights out" internal processing, shared services, and outsourced functions.

Once the decision to outsource has been made, the provider has been selected and the contract has been negotiated, managing the client/provider relationship will be instrumental to your F&A outsourcing success. Focusing on the relationship, properly shaping the solution, purposeful governance, restructuring the retained organization, operationalizing the contract, educating your organization on outsourcing and getting third-party assistance will help create a sustainable, long-term relationship with your provider.

This white paper focuses on answering these questions. The F&A BPO trend is sustainable, and many companies continue along that path. However, as with any business process trend, clear pros and cons will become obvious over the long-term that were not readily apparent for the early adopters. A well-documented list of the pros and cons of outsourcing is provided in this white paper.

The A to Z of Outsourcing

White Paper | Category: Strategy & Business Case IT Infrastructure & Applications Finance & Accounting Services...

Outsourcing has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years. At times, the logistics of outsourcing can seem complex but, the basic idea of outsourcing is of course very simple – reap the benefits of having a specialist do a specific job for less money than it would cost for you to do it yourself. However, when it comes time to setting up the right outsourcing agreement, you may be overwhelmed with the complex and bewildering array of outsourcing terms and jargon.

As a result, we at Alsbridge wrote this outsourcing guide to help anyone involved in outsourcing understand the main terminology. The "A to Z of Outsourcing" isn't intended to be an exhaustive manual, but rather it is a guide to help you understand common outsourcing terms and concepts. If you don't know your ARC's from your Earnback, this outsourcing overview is definitely for you.

We've tried to make this outsourcing guide comprehensive without creating an encyclopedia. However if there's anything you would like to know which isn't included, or which isn't clear, feel free to contact ALsbridge, we'd be delighted to hear from you. Our goal is to make understanding outsourcing as easy and simple as possible so you can gain the most benefit from your deals.