Outsourcing involves the subcontracting of operations and processes that could normally be performed in-house by another company or even country. Tecnovate was operating as a captive Business Operations facility for ebookers until ebookers was acquired by Cendant in 2004. In 2005, Tecnovate was doing extremely well. The outsourcing that was initially aimed at cutting down costs had become a highway to growth. Consequently, under the leadership of Myron Ferro, Tecnovate felt that it was ready to take up further functions by lending itself to outsourcing not just its operations but its processes too (Yadav, 2006).
Ferro, the director of operations, had extensive experience in the travel business which was the core function of Tecnovate. He understood, and appreciated, that the BPO business was challenging especially when it came to processing outsourcing. Initially, Tecnovate had engaged in a step by step outsourcing of the services that were viewed as less critical to the business like offline data entry and hotel booking confirmations (Yadav, 2006).
In its first major outsourcing process, Prashant, the company’s CEO, subjected the outsourcing idea to four major steps: scoping, analysing, due diligence and transitioning (Yavad, 2006). Scoping involves analysing the objectives, the scope, constraints and human resource implications. Analysing involves evaluating the feasibility of the move in terms of pricing before embarking on signing contracts. The Tecnovate process of outsourcing appears quite straightforward with clear-cut steps, as compared to the one in the text. It is because Tecnovate’s first attempt to outsource was well thought out and registered immense success. Consequently, the management did not have to keep going back to the previous step in the outsourcing process to correct an earlier mistake. Additionally, the steps in the text are meant to be applied to a myriad of companies which necessitates that it takes care of a spectrum of processes and descriptions.
For Ferro to manage the massive influx of new processes waiting to be transferred from Cendant, I would propose that he engages the services of Travel guru employees and promote the already experienced ones. It will ensure that the company has an adequate human resource to handle the processes. It is also important that Ferro monitors the influx of these processes so that they are not overwhelmed. It would also help to swap some teams from Cendant with some from Tecnovate so that Tecnovate can learn some best practices from Cendant (Yadav, 2006).
References
Yadav, V. (2006). Tecnovate: Challenges of Business Process Outsourcing. 06/311C, 1-21.
