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Weighing Multiple Service Centers
There are many business imperatives for using multiple regional-service centers in an outsourced HR environment, but establishing a variety of service centers can sharply multiply complexity, client risk and the burden of managing the outsourced relationship. The drivers leading to a multiple-center solution are real, but the advantages must be equally measured against real cost and management burdens. Only after very careful review should a client accept multiple centers for the performance of HR services. Most clients use more than one service center in large, global outsourcing contracts. The most common model is the regional-service center for local populations, most often used to maximize local language proficiency, provide culturally attuned resources, reduce time-zone challenges and ease time delays for document distribution when mailings or contracts are required. Multiple service centers are also required when local call centers are used due to local language requirements, and these call centers are coupled with other specialized production and employee-data-management centers. To graphically illustrate this: Against these seemingly efficient working models for HR services, we need to be aware of the following real-world problems: * Is the service provider updating all of its technology on the same schedule in all production centers? If the European, Middle Eastern and African production or call center is behind the North American center for implementation of a full number upgrade, the data coming out of EMEA may have to be converted or reconfigured before it can be uploaded into client tables and reports. * Is one production or service center subject to greater political or natural disaster risks than another? Civil unrest, earthquakes, flooding and similar problems can all cripple the overall delivery of services and data to the workforce. * How are overall service levels managed? Does the client truly have "one throat to choke," or are multiple throats embedded in every general-service undertaking by the provider? Again, the cost and burden to the client of managing multiple service centers and service levels for each can be quite large. * Is time-zone reduction of any real benefit except for call-center work? Most data and production requests are managed today by work flow and not by e-mail direction. Those requests can go into the system at any time, and then be sequenced for attention when they are pulled off the production-input task file. The problems with multiple service sites are real, and the cost of managing these issues is not readily apparent to most clients. It is clear that much of our current service modelling is due to historical asset purchases. Many providers got their start in global service delivery by buying the service-center assets of various clients. The service-center locations were often chosen by the client for business reasons, not for the availability of reliable, well-educated, low-cost service-center resources. Clients looking at a multi-center solution should carefully consider the very real disadvantages such a solution can pose. Lowell Williams is executive director of HR Advisory Services for EquaTerra, a BPO consulting firm based in Houston. He can be reached at lowell.williams@equaterra.com. April 1, 2011 Copyright 2011© LRP Publications |
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© Copyright 2012 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
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