Outsourcing, business process outsourcing or BPOs seem to be ubiquitous terms that we ordinarily associate to call centers or "offshored" IT projects.
However, Wilmer Olano, vice-president of a Cebu-based IT outsourcing company, Global Smartsourcing, Inc, brings the idea of outsourcing to another landscape other than cost issues. "Outsourcing is not just about driving costs down or merely relegating non-core functions to service providers, it is about building strategic alliances. Part of our business practice has been, to a great extent, not only delivering customer specifications but going beyond those specifications."
Sustaining growth is a key issue most outsourcing companies have to deal with most of the time because most outsourcing vendors simply look at projects as short-term requirements. The moment you deliver better than expected results you help your customers become competitive. That's how Olano sees it.
"We take an active role to help push our customers to the top. And when they begin to see this effort, they see a whole new perspective to the outsourcing relationship as a 'logical business extension' to help their business thrive competitively in their industry. Smartsourcing aims to enable companies to not only focus on innovating their core competencies, but enabling them to innovate on the non-core components they outsource."
Outsourcing is a tricky business. Customers need to be assured that their projects are well understood by the vendor. Many outsourcing projects fail because of a clear lack of communication and collaboration between the vendor and the customer. Aside the distance, differences in language and management practices matter in a project. And phone or email is simply not enough to address changes and issues in between projects. This is where smartsourcing comes in.
In smartsourcing, language and management issues are resolved because collaborative platforms are built-in to zero in every issue that snarls the progress of the project. In smartsourcing, clients and vendors are assured that they agree every step of the way from scratch to finish.
"Those that engage in smartsourcing like us, provide a web-based project management tool for our customers to enter additional requests or make changes to every project component. Critical to any offshore project we undertake, we provide the framework for collaboration using our web-based project management tool where clients are updated or can collaborate in one or every aspect of the project giving them the peace of mind and assurance of precise results in the best possible manner." says, Olano
Further to that, mistakes are considerably reduced and changes are responded to quickly, thus, further reduce the time spent on a project. Seems a very smart idea indeed!
Olano is also bullish that outsourcing will continue to grow as an industry in the Philippines and in Cebu in particular. The demand for outsourcing "is unstoppable and we need to work smart to grab that demand to the fullest. "Cebu is endowed with great talent. From web design to designing software architecture. We have the edge because we have the skill. Plus, we are used to western management culture and the language advantage compared to our competitors like India, Romania and Russia."
After leaving a Silicon Valley-based company, Olano encourages Cebuano talents to also try their luck in outsourcing. "It was a risk that I had to take although during that time, outsourcing wasn't really this big. I believe there's just so much that we can do to tap this very big opportunity before us and most often, it only takes to be a little different to get noticed and build positive relationships. Essentially, that's what smartsourcing is."
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