Category: Offshore outsourcing

Business Transformation Outsourcing (BTO) is the branch of outsourcing in which the company revamps its selected processes to transform the business by following a collaborative approach with its vendor. Here, the company is actively involved in the outsourced operation and is usually accompanied by joint investment with vested interests. Of late, there had been a macro-level shift in consumer dynamics and workforce demographics making the old business models obsolete. A BTO project results in the development of technology-based transformations rather than simply lowering costs. BTO is evolving very fast as companies are seeking creative ways to innovate with the help of consultants. Quite often, it has resulted in the formation of a new organization staffed by both employees with its own gain-sharing provisions. BTO makes the company capable of responding quickly to the changing market trends and assist in the innovation of product, service or a process besides keeping a tab on the cost. It helps the company retain significant control over the outsourced service. With BTO, your organization can make sweeping changes to improve revenue, support growth, reduce costs, lower risk and develop the necessary capabilities to stay competitive. Business transformation outsourcing helps you get rid of wasteful processes and increase productivity, quality and customer experience. To keep the customers happy and gain market share in this highly competitive environment, business leaders are realizing the importance of business transformation outsourcing. Though most of the challenges facing the business are not entirely new it is the technology that is changing continuously entailing new roles and definitions for people and processes involved. A flexible business model is what you need today. How is it different from traditional outsourcing? BTO based model is more responsible towards its customers (outsourcers) as the customer is closely associated with the service provider during the entire project. A BTO project is a long-term proposition as it takes time to evolve and is not set with deadlines like in a traditional outsourcing project. It is more or less similar to a consulting agreement wherein the customer and the service provider agree upon a final strategic goal and start working backwards; and after the accomplishment of desired results after a period of say five years, the customer is less likely to renew such a project. As per the experts in the industry, business transformation outsourcing makes a lot of sense in today’s world as it holds the capability of cutting the rhetorical tasks of the traditional outsourcing process. Unlike traditional outsourcing, BTO is focused on continuous quality improvement. Strikingly, BTO and traditional outsourcing are neither mutually exclusive nor married as BTO facilitates continuous strategic change while outsourcing. Potential benefits of business transformation outsourcing • Exploring the full potential of the outsourced process – BTO project involves the identification of the problem in the outsourced process itself and finding an apt solution to fix it. It helps you identify growth opportunities and prioritize projects to be in-line with your company’s strategy. • Value addition – Value addition can be in any form. For instance, an outsourcing company decided to inform its customers about new products and offerings during inbound calls, thus, saving significant costs associated with marketing. • Customer-driven service model –  Respond quickly to changing customer requirements by understanding and improving each step in the customer experience cycle. • Leveraging the knowledge, experience and capabilities of the vendor – Besides innovation, the BTO process involves sharing resources with the vendor. As vendors have vast experience and enhanced capabilities by working across multiple clients, it is certainly beneficial for the customer to build upon that. • Mix of consulting services and traditional outsourcing – A BTO project is often marked by consulting services along with the traditional outsourcing tasks so that the customer gets twin benefits of consultation and outsourcing without having to go elsewhere. • Freeing up funds to allow investment – It allows your company to unlock the potential of locked funds, which can be directed towards a sustainable competitive advantage. Moreover, it helps you optimize your capital requirements to avoid redundancy. • Scaling infrastructure to meet demand and revenue growth – Infrastructure development is made flexible enough to adapt to volatile market conditions. It allows you to introduce new products and services with greater success. It also enables you to explore new markets and customers. • Carry out large scale changes with reduced risk – An experienced business partner will help you smoothly make that transition with premeditated risk factors involved. For instance, by shifting your fixed costs to variable ones, you can reduce risk exposure by minimising your investment in inefficient assets and reducing the amount of debt required to finance them. • Continuous process improvement – BTO is not limited to one-time cost saving as in business process outsourcing but continuously works towards process improvement. • Improved margins for your company – It helps your company to reduce Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) expense through cost structures that can scale to meet peaks and troughs in demand. Factors to keep in mind before opting for BTO • BTO projects can impact multiple levels of an organization, and the customer must introspect whether the management can work in tandem with the service provider and accept constructive criticism from her. • Premeditate the impact of this transition on different departments of your company and the flexibility of approach required from them. Involve them from the very beginning to avoid bottlenecks later. • Analyse the impact it can have on your existing customers. • Evaluate the prospective vendors based on their customized strategy suiting your business need, track record and market credentials. Select the one that strikes a cord with your organization. • It is most appropriate to tie the vendor’s compensation with the success rate of the project. • Establish a goal for yourself rather than letting the vendor do that though you may fine-tune it with their support. • Do not get carried away by short-term business gains as a BTO project requires significant investment.

Managed outsourcing is the process of transferring key activities in your business to an external service provider to cut down costs, add value, improving operational efficiency without adding to your expenses. It helps the companies to focus more on their core competencies and bring significant returns on investment especially when the companies themselves lack in internal capabilities. Managed outsourcing service providers bring in their expertise in different categories, varied experience by dealing with multiple clients. Managed outsourcing may also involve procurement activity, which is either direct or indirect procurement. While direct procurement deals with procurement of your basic raw materials to run your company, indirect procurement usually involves support functions like marketing, IT and HR related services, office services etc. As a result, it is the indirect procurement, which is outsourced the most. Managed outsourcing often results in higher returns on investment, thereby, increasing organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Businesses often notice jumps in productivity. It enables your company to form stronger and more strategic relationships with suppliers. Managed outsourcing service providers add value to your business and help you to curb significant costs. In this article, let us take a look at what procurement outsourcing is, which comes under managed outsourcing too. Procurement service providers are the ones who have achieved a strong expertise in procurement of goods and services, especially, indirect procurement. They offer a wide variety of services including purchase transaction, spend analysis, category management, e-procurement services, supplier management and much more which shall be discussed briefly ahead. Main areas of outsourcing solutions: • Purchase transactions – All procurement activities involve purchase transactions. Processing of purchase orders, managing quotation request, invoice matching and payment are some of the most common purchase transactions. Experienced service providers efficiently handle these transactions. • Quality measurement and development – Strong analytical approach to measure quality, spending patterns and compliance to standard methods is deployed by service providers. Service providers ensure quality checks at different levels of product manufacturing or a service process. • Contract outsourcing – Legal weapon like contract negotiation becomes a tedious job when your company does not have relevant experience to negotiate terms and conditions with your buyers and suppliers. Moreover, it consumes a lot of time, which you can, otherwise, devote to your core business activities. By outsourcing your contract formation services to an agency brings your expertise from different fields. • Strategic sourcing – Strategic sourcing deals with corporate supply and sourcing strategies. Strategic sourcing is not focused only on cost but it concentrates on the total cost of ownership, thereby, incorporating customer needs, organizational goals and market conditions. Its aim is to get the best product or a service at the best possible price. Strategic sourcing is based on a collaborative approach and the decisions made are supported by factual analysis and market intelligence; and it is a continuous process that evolves with time. • Procure to pay system – Procure to pay is a process, which starts from creating a formal request for purchase to the payment entry in the general ledger. The intermediate processes involve creation of purchase order, invoice and payment of invoice. The efficient application of this automated cycle comes with many benefits for your organization. It increases your transactional efficiency, reduces transaction processing cost, enable quick dispute resolution and better collaboration with your vendors. • Category management – Category management involves the development of different product categories as a strategic business unit. It makes sure that sale of Product A does not get affected with the increase in sales of Product B. To add to it, companies have realized its importance from the fact that price negotiation is not enough for profit gains and increasing overall sales of the category is of primary concern. It also involves participation of supplier in the process. • Spend management – Spend management focuses on controlling business spends. The expenses could be related to operating cost, administrative cost or cost of any other business activity in the supply chain. Both indirect and direct costs form a part of spend management. Spend management helps you to avoid ad hoc expenses and increase spend economies of scale. It also takes into account VAT/Tax, fluctuation in cost of raw materials, demand, exchange rate factors to get a holistic view. • Tail spend management – Tail spends are 20% of your total expenses, which you make on 80% of your suppliers. As a natural approach, businesses tend to focus on 20% of suppliers who form a majority of your supplies. But in vain, they are not able to cut-down their expenses after a particular level. To come out of this approach, it is wise to start working on these unexplored business expenses, which are spread across 80% of your suppliers who do not form a majority of your supplies. There are many software that give you insight into tail spends. • Spend Analytics – Spend analysis is crucial to your business to give you valuable insights into your spending patterns. It comes with many benefits. The sole purpose of this task is to reduce procurement costs, improve operational efficiency and monitor contracts/purchasing policy compliance. It counters issues like supply risk and ad hoc spending. Activities like inventory management, budgeting, research and development also come under the purview of spend analysis. • E-Procurement services – E-procurement services refer to online buying and selling of goods/services. Buyers and sellers meet on internet and specify their requirements/quotations. Ongoing purchases may qualify the customers for bulk-buying discounts and special offers. E-procurement software helps the businesses to automate their buying and selling process, and thereby, save cost of transaction and manage inventory cycles. Therefore, it forms an integral part of supply chain management. • Supplier management – Maintaining relationship with your suppliers involves co-ordination among the two parties across business and functional touch points. Supplier management focuses on strategic alliance with your supplier to maximize value, reduce risk, achieve competitive edge and deliver escalated levels of innovation. It helps you enhance relationship with your key

When a company hires a third party to perform all or a part of their HR functions, it’s known as Human Resource Outsourcing. Most of the times it’s the smaller firms that outsource their entire HR function. The larger firms prefer to outsource only few specialized functions like Pension & Health Plan administration, so that they can pay closer attention on the other important functions. HRO ENTERPRISE HRO DISCREET HRO Outsourcing of the entire HR Function Outsourcing of a single process in the HR Function There are many things that one must bear in mind before outsourcing one’s HR functions. Good human resource management software programs come with similar core functions. However many of them differ on various aspects that is difficult to describe in a single article. However, we have made a list of factors that you should most certainly look for while choosing an HRM tool. Some of the most important functions of HRM tools are: • Managing personnel information: The tool that you purchase or install must support all kinds of employees. Whether they are full time employees, contractual workers, interns or freelancers, their information should be properly entered in the HRM tool. In fact, a tool that works closely with Hr department must also be able to enter information of all kinds of working relationships. • Self-service of management: Whether it is an employee or a manager, they should be able to enter information and manage their records to an extent. The HRM tool should also provide users with facilities to access information, retrieve data and also make changes when required. Thus, even employees should be able to access certain areas of the HRM tool. • Absence management: There is nothing more important than managing your employees leaves and absences. Whether they fall sick or they are on leave because of official work, employees should be able to apply for leave permits on their own. This will reduce a lot of problems that a manager might encounter later on. • Time and attendance: A good HRM tool tracks at what time an employee logs in or enters an office’s premises. It also tracks how long they stayed within the campus and when they left. IT makes sure that precious man-hours are not lost and that those precious hours are not lost in thin air. • Benefits: The HRM tool must also be able to monitor and configure insurance, provident funds, loans, pensions and healthcare. This will ensure that there are no disputes between employers and employees at a later stage. Moreover, it also ensures that a lot of time is saved. Such information will need to be pulled out occasionally and thus, accessing such information should be very easy. • Payroll: A good HRM tool must be able to calculate the number of hours worked, overtime, bonuses given to a particular employee, deductions, taxes, and contributions. All the information needs to be entered accessed easily. HRM tools that make this unnecessarily difficult will end up causing a lot of trouble to companies than helping them in any way. • Position management: An efficient HRM tool should be able to describe positions, list employees roles and their hierarchy, draw organizational charts, matrices and such other graphical information. It is crucial for HR managers to access this information on demand. • Analytics: A serious HRM tool will also provide enough analytics to predict and analyze future trends in workplace. It will offer crucial data about employee trends and how they may behave in the future. • Mobile support: Now that everyone carries a smartphone, an HRM tool must be available on every smartphone that is worth considering, including iOS devices, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry. We have listed 5 of the most used HRM tools today, especially from an outsourcing perspective. Given below are those 5 tools and a brief description of each of the 5 tools. • SAP ERP HRM SAP ERP HRM goes by the service name of ERP Human Capital management and is licensed by the parent company SAP. With more than 500 employees, SAP is one of the largest IT companies in the world. Without a doubt, SAP ERP HCM is also one of the most popular HRM tools around. The tool not only helps employees to achieve their career goals but also helps employers to attain and achieve their business objectives. It leverages SAP ERP software and helps companies to streamline, automate, and run ERP and HRM processes that are often complex and difficult to handle. You could also go ahead and automate employee administration, which is one of the most important aspects of an HRM tool. SAP ERP HCM comes with features like time management, payroll administration, reporting of legal processes and a host of other features that make it very popular among users. It helps companies to attract and hire the right kind of people while making newly hired recruits more productive. Once they are recruited, their progress and contributions can be effectively tracked and monitored. • Oracle Fusion Oracle Fusion also goes by the name of Fusion Human Capital Management and is licensed by Oracle, one of the largest service providers in the world. With HIPAA and SAS 70 Type II compliance, Oracle Fusion is the HRM tool of choice for many people. It comes with telephone, email, online and 24 x 7 support that can be used to troubleshoot problems. It offers support for mobile devices and has a specialized iPad app. The tool enables companies to engineer a global foundation of HR data that will ultimately help companies to improve business processes. It helps companies to increase productivity and lower costs by accelerating performance. Oracle HCM Cloud makes use of cloud computing to ensure that a lot of storage space is not occupied. Cloud services are available via subscription and are a great way to ensure that your data is safe and available at all times. It can be used for global HR processes, goal management, compensation,

The concept of outsourcing is nothing new and has existed for hundreds of years, if not for thousands. During the earlier days of Industrial revolution many of the businesses being frugal, started switching the production of their goods to countries with cheaper labour force. With a development in the routes of transport more countries started outsourcing their trade to other countries, gradually leading to outsourcing to India and other countries. Today outsourcing is gaining more popularity due to a lot of reasons. Unlike earlier times, outsourcing is not done only to reduce costs but for several other reasons: • Concentrate on core competencies • Increase productivity • Acquire skilled work force • Provide the customers with low cost goods Outsourcing is the process of hiring a third party to perform the non-core functions so that the business can pay more attention on its core competencies. For e.g.  How many of us have the time or money to respond to every call and e-mail, buy gifts, and pay the bills?  A personal assistant could be hired to take care of all this but it might not be feasible. The solution for such problems is to hire a company that provides a group of skilled assistants to take care of these petty jobs at a much lesser cost. Outsourcing can be broadly classified in to • IT Outsourcing • Knowledge Process Outsourcing • Business Process Outsourcing • All IT functions or a part of it is outsourced. • Pay roll, internal auditing, billing, data entry, editing, answering phone calls etc. • Content writing, legal services, animation, intellectual property research etc. IT outsourcing and India In this day and age, where information technology has become crucial to the existence of a business, it is essential that every business has a well-built IT system in place. The cost incurred in terms of money, time and people to build up your own IT management team is exorbitant. Hence almost every business prefers to have a third party handle the entire or a part of its IT function. Despite having many major competitors like China, Japan, Mexico etc., India has managed to become the most favourable outsourcing destination. IT industry has existed in India for a very long time, but it was completely under the control of the government. A few decades ago, the Central government of India introduced policies to encourage commercial participation in the telecom industry. India is one of the countries with a large English-speaking population. It has a big group of skilled work force who speaks English apart from their regional languages. The group of skilled work force is expanding with an increasing number of students graduating every year. IT companies have divided their work force in to night and day shifts to ensure 24×7 services. This helps in bridging the communication gap resulting from difference in time-zones of both the companies. India also has its own set of hi-tech infrastructural facilities and services that are aligned with the international standards like ISO, six-sigma and so on. So it’s not the number but the quality of the work force & infrastructural facilities that makes India as one of the most favourable outsourcing destination. Future of outsourced IT management in India The future of the outsourced IT management in India depends on how it tackles deals with the changing trends: • According to the reports from NASSCOM Engineering Summit 2013 the future of outsourcing doesn’t lie with the IT sector alone. There will be a gradual movement towards electronic, mechanical & aeronautical engineering. Research & Development has a crucial place in the development or advancement of any technology and it demands a group of skilled work force and infrastructural facilities. India might have a large pool of multiple skilled people, but it lacks the ability to tap the right type of skilled worker and also the social security laws needed to conduct background verification of these workers. The development in terms of infrastructure is also negligible. Hence the companies and the government should work together to ensure adequate supply of skilled workforce and hi-tech infrastructural facilities. For example: ‘Power To Empower 2013’ is a programme launched by India@75, Confederation of Indian Industry and the National Skill Development Corporation that aims at encouraging the young students and entrepreneurs. Another example would be: ‘Aadhaar Diffusion Project’ by NASSCOM, which aims at building an identity infrastructure that helps in authenticating an individual’s identity anywhere and anytime. • The IT Industry aims at providing customers with high quality goods at low prices. With increasing labour costs in larger cities, many outsourcing companies are actually encouraging attrition. This has lead to high levels of stress and chaos amongst the employees, which sometimes deteriorates the quality of their work. Hence companies should slowly move in to smaller cities where cost of labour is lesser. • India is yet to realize the importance of patenting its intellectual property so that it can retain a competitive edge over the others in the market. It might be too late if a competitor patents IT processes before you do because this will prevent you from using the same processes. • “You should do only what you do best in-house, and outsource the rest.” – Late Dick Benson. Over time, clients are going to outsource more of their business processes or services. Thus companies with experience in back office operation get an opportunity to deal with more complex processes or services. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. For a very long time India has had only IT clients and very little attention was paid to other aspects of business. If the company has to find a way up the value chain, it’s essential that they learn to communicate effectively and work efficiently with other businesses too. This doesn’t mean that the front office operations are more important while compared to back-office operations. One aspect cannot be prioritized over the other. For a country like India with a large group of work force

Gone are the days when the fate of business was only decided by either self willed freelancers or local employees. Now dedicated employees are the ones who call the shots. And they do it rather well. Dedicated employees have given employers a chance to explore a whole new dimension in the realm of recruitments, but like any other recruitment process hiring dedicated professionals can prove to be extremely taxing and tedious, if not done skillfully. Even though most of the dedicated employees are remote employees, recruiting them still adds to the woes of an employer because of a lack of direct supervision. Hiring and interviewing dedicated employees Usually dedicated employees work from an economically cheaper location and most of them work from their parent offices, which still makes it important for employers to evaluate the psyche and the acumen of a candidate for the desired job. Recruiters must keep in mind that getting the right person for a job is as important as assigning the right job to the right person, which calls for a deep and sound understanding of human psyche. While recruiting you are not expected to be a pro at understanding human behavioral patterns and psyche, but there are a few ground rules which can help you take the right decision and forestall the financial implications that come along with a wrong decision. Now, as we proceed, it must be made clear that interviewing dedicated employees isn’t a cakewalk and assessing a candidate’s strengths and capabilities without a psychological evaluation is mostly futile. Basic psychological evaluation done at the stage of interviewing can work wonders for you in deciding whether the candidate fits the bill or not. Psychological assessment can very well avert the woes that come from hiring a misfit candidate. Employers with little idea about human psyche find getting a grip on psychological assessment extremely unnerving. To ease this discomfort, you can hire a clinical psychologist. Moreover, most of the assessments listed below can only be administered by a registered psychologist. Most of these assessments are done with the help of projective tests which are known to reveal underlying cognitions and unconscious matter that form the basis for understanding human behavior.These tests help in understanding a person’s character and his response to basic stimuli, which in turn can be used to predict the person’s behavior in certain situations. A good understanding of a candidate’s behavior can go a long way in making the right decision; it can not only save you from spending sleepless nights in the fear of not being able to get your work done, but also increase the productivity of the company. Here are 4 of the most important projective tests that you could use to hire dedicated employees: • The Rorschach Inkblot Test This technique is an indispensible part of psychological assessment. Created by Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach, this psychological test involves interpretation of inkblots to analyze a person’s personality and emotional functioning. This is widely popular for determining a person’s thought disorder especially when the person is reluctant to discuss his thought process, a similar situation is more likely to occur during an interview where candidates intentionally veil their true appearances and try to appear idyllic. This psychological test can be used to crack open through them and analyze their emotions. This test is believed to furnish in-depth knowledge about the personality structure of a candidate, which can help in determining a suitable job role for the candidate to optimize the productivity. While interviewing it is extremely important to understand a candidate’s capabilities and his disposition towards the job in question, this can be achieved with Rorschach. Selecting the wrong candidate can not only spell doom, but can also invite stress which is completely uncalled for. Make sure this psychological test is practiced by a registered clinical psychologist. • Thematic Apperception Test Another personality assessment test which is famous for its promising results is the Thematic Apperception Test. This helps to determine a person’s disposition for a particular job or occupation and also throws light on the motivational stimuli for a candidate. With the help of this test a trained clinical psychologist can gauge a candidate’s need for achievement and power by evoking the subconscious state. More often than not, candidates have to take up this test when they apply for jobs related to military, academics, law enforcement and bureaucracy. Clearly, for such jobs astuteness is more importance than intelligence, which can be easily evaluated by such projective tests. This test involves interpreting 10 out of a total 31 cards. All of these cards have pictures of people in different situations. These pictures are necessarily thought provoking and are capable of varying interpretations, they are designed so to evoke underlying thoughts and emotions of the candidates. The subject of this test i.e. the candidate must interpret the images in his own way and develop a story based on the picture shown. A psychologist may also ask the interviewee to describe a blank TAT card. In an interview, one important quality that every recruiter looks for is a candidate’s ability to solve problems which in recent times has become a prerequisite, lest the employer grumble under his breath with frustration. Being an employer you do not want to address all the trivial problems of your employees, hence most of the recruiters make sure that the dedicated employees that they hire have some knack for problem solving. Thematic Apperception Test is a great tool to explore the problem solving ability of a person and hence it has been mandated while selection of employees for important jobs related to international and national importance. • Draw-a-Person Test Earlier the use of this test was only limited to kids for getting a better judgment of their personality traits, but later it was developed and modified to measure the intelligence levels in adults. This psychometric test can also reveal the differences in personalities of people, a tool which comes handy while analyzing whether a candidate’s personality

Dedicated hiring is considered the best model of engagement in comparison to your in-house human resource. As a matter of fact, it confers flexibility in selecting your resource as and when needed. Moreover, it keeps you away from chasing offshore freelancers with lack of commitment. As an outsourcing business agency, dedicated hiring services save you a great deal of cost besides ensuring that the quality of work delivered is of superlative degree. This engagement model is widely preferred by agencies which require full-time based dedicated teams. You can hire such teams for varying needs including but not limited to product and software development, web application development, ecommerce websites, JAVA/PHP based programs and so on. After your initial inquiry, the offshore agency engages in requirement analysis and accordingly you can hire a dedicated team of individuals committed to you. Dedicated hiring ensures a seamless handling of your offshore projects with multitude of gains to your business: • Hire the best talent available – Dedicated hiring gives you the option of choosing the best talent which is in-line with your programming needs. And you get specialists in nearly all the fields including SEO, .net, magneto, JAVA, PHP, mobile application developers and many more. You can also increase or decrease the size of your team with time thereby optimizing your operational cost. • Axe your overheads – Your outsourcing vendors take complete care of your dedicated team. Support infrastructure like hardware and software, office space fall under the ambit of your service provider. Thus, it negates your focus required on unnecessary tasks while concentrating more on the actual task. • Remotely manage your offshore team – The outsourcing vendor equips your dedicated team with the necessary communication support including video conferencing, PC sharing, high speed data sharing, and mobile connectivity so that you gain a real control over your virtual employees by monitoring them remotely. Moreover, you have full control over project planning while the knowledge is kept under your purview. • Bypass legal boundaries – Your dedicated resource may be spread across the globe serving different needs. Irrespective of that, you save yourself from delving into legal issues including government clearances, taxes or company registration specific to the laws of the land whether it is Asia or Latin America. • Control over data security – Virtual employees in developing countries have access to sensitive information of your business. But with cloud-based servers owned by your company, whole information is stored within your servers. Moreover, data security is of utmost importance to the well-established outsourcing vendors. • Accountability – The outsourcing agency is entirely responsible for keeping a check on the workers and their functioning. And they make sure that the dedicated team working under your company is aligned to your instructions and developmental goals. Besides this, any goof ups and irregularities by your team are daily reported to you so that you can take timely action. • Staff management – The virtual team working beneath you is under a contractual agreement with the outsourcing vendor. Consequently, all HR related issues like employee leave and employee benefits are subjected under vendor’s jurisdiction. Whether it is attrition rate or salary hike, none of it is your concern as far as your work is being delivered. Furthermore, you need not invest in annual bonuses, insurance and medical allowances. • Nurture long-term relationship – Your in-house team works in tandem with the offshore dedicated team. Continuous working over various projects develops a level of understanding between culturally different teams thereby nourishing strong working relationship among them. • Save your time and money by hiring a dedicated resource team – Due to lack of experience and expertise, it is advisable that you invest in dedicated resources as the whole arrangement is cost effective as compared to your in-house resource. And it is a well known fact that IT employees need regular training to keep up with the technological advancements. By outsourcing your services, you save the entire cost of training. Though dedicated hiring comes with numerous advantages for your business, you will need to make sure you are working with the right agency. Make a thorough check before associating with any offshore service providers. Ask for their credentials, verify them and then proceed on a contractual basis.

Sales collateral is the support material used by the salesperson of the company to make the overall selling process easier. Whether you are selling a product or a service, sales collateral forms an integral part of your company’s marketing strategy. Growing curiosity and awareness among customers about different brands necessitates that your company creates a right mix of collateral that enhances not only your sales but also builds your brand image. As a company, your business may be dealing either with B2B or B2C customers.  Given the circumstances, utmost care should be taken in designing sales collateral keeping in mind the corporate identity of your brand. Let us see how your sales collateral should look like: • Website content – Every company big or small must have a web presence as it is the first thing which comes to customer’s mind to know about you. The website content should not contain vague or copied information. Maintain originality and quality of the content posted. Also, make sure the website loads quickly and is easy to navigate. Your website should be interactive in nature to let the customers post their queries, chat with your sales executive and even email you. You can make a great website by hiring a professional designer by closely feeding him details about your company, product or service. • Blog – Blogs have gained huge popularity among customers as it gives you the opportunity of sharing knowledge with your prospects. Blogs don’t talk specifically about your products rather they emphasize more on the broader picture of the market, innovations, scope of advancement and many other interesting topics you may think of. It is not limited to anything specific but it should be interesting enough to generate revisits. Do not forget to include social media sharing buttons and RSS feeds on your blog to enable wider circulation of your blogs. • Presence on social media platforms – It is extremely important to be present on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google + etc to engage directly with the customers through comments and likes. Customers interact freely on social media and are in a better position to express their true opinion about your product. In addition, it gives them the opportunity of sharing the links of your website/blog or product information with their friends and family members. • Visual aids – Customers ought to remember what they see more than what they hear. Visual aids may include both electronic and traditional/paper medium. Your visual aid may include sales presentation, word documents, other computer files and product videos in electronic form while it may include technical data sheets, brochures, catalogues, direct mailers etc in paper media. Traditional materials can also contain product pictures, bar diagrams, charts to add to the sales process. And fortunately, all traditional content can be presented in the electronic format. To add to the visual image, corporate identity package plays a crucial role in representing your business professionally. • Webinars – Webinars are catching up faster than any other medium to assist your sales team in organizing group demos of your product and explain about the services you offer. Webinars provide a virtual experience of sales presentation to a group of customers. It is a two-way communication platform wherein customers get an equal chance of raising their queries. • Sharing customer success stories – Highlighting the customer success stories brings a smile on your customers’ face. They try to experience the same satisfaction virtually as generated by the satisfied customers. To verify the authenticity of your sources, you can even request some of your old and loyal customers to share their detailed experience and their contact details. You can share their stories through your website or sales presentation. • Awareness surveys – The product awareness survey is an indirect method of generating awareness level among your leads. It is usually in the form of structured questionnaire. The surveys enable your salespersons to have a clear idea about what the customers think or know about your product or company. It also enables them to be prepared for a better confrontation with your prospects. So, though such surveys may not be directly given by the salespersons but they do form an essential part of your company’s sales collateral.

Before we get to the bottom of an astounding estimate that flexi-hiring in India is going to increase by 20% by 2020, there are a few facts and figures you need to take notice of. 10% of overall workforce in India could be working as a flexi staff by 2025 and another 1.3 million people employed in Indian flexi staffing will form 3% of organized sector employment. The actual number of flexi workers in India is projected to touch 9 million by 2025. Another important fact to note is that about 79% of flexi staff in India falls in 21-30 year age group which indicates flexi hiring for entry-level positions is the preferred choice for employers. Why choose India? Despite the global slowdown, there is a steep rise in flexi hiring among IT companies in India. There is also a rise in just-in-time hiring due to volatile market conditions. Moreover, shifting focus towards core activities facilitates flexi hiring for non-core activities. India is one of the top Asian countries in flexi hiring, the country will help you cut down your rising human capital expenses. With limited budgets and a decline in the hire of new recruits, many HR officials are resorting to hiring temps to get the work done. The flexible workforce in India is extremely talented, hard-working with innate problem-solving capabilities with the best IT and ITES training institutes across the country. There is also a large database of skilled professionals with expertise in all kinds of programming languages, coding techniques, web and mobile application development Some of the features of an Indian flexi-workforce: • Hiring a flexi staff from India comes with numerous benefits including saving office space, hardware and software investment, infrastructure investment, end-to-end technical support, freedom from employment tax, labour laws and insurance of workers. • Despite the difference in the time zone, they are readily available for work in accordance with the American time zone. • Strong cultural orientation training provided to IT/ITES professionals to serve the client at par with the locally hired professional • Flexi staff recruitment agencies in India provide you with seamless support in getting the best talent to serve your needs at an affordable cost. It also minimizes the employer’s risk as the day-to-day administration and supervision are taken care of by the recruiting agency. Benefits of a flexible workforce • Beat margin pressures – With the cut-throat margins in the IT market, flexi hiring helps you deal with swinging market conditions and beat your competitors’ pricing and quotations. • Potential to turn into a permanent employee – Though a temporary workforce is employed on a short-term contractual basis, but they can always turn into your “tried and tested” permanent employees in the long run by gaining sufficient experience. Thus, saving you a considerable training cost. • Specialist temps – Temps are not only hired for taking care of entry-level jobs, even a specialist temp can be hired for a short-term basis depending upon the need of the project. Many companies hire specialist trainers to train their permanent workforce from time to time. Besides this, specialist temps assist in project planning, database set up and implementation and so on. • Regulate your staff requirement – Staff optimization is another major advantage as you need to hire temps as and when required. Therefore, payroll expenses are minimized and there is no labour redundancy. • Deal with temporary workload intelligently and sustain customer delight – In the IT industry, we find that the workload increases spontaneously when the number of orders increases or when complicated and tougher projects arise. To deliver timely service to all your clients, you can hire temps to meet the deadlines and keep your customers happy. • Reduce time and cost of selection – Flexi hiring eliminates complex and expensive procedures of hiring. It also enables faster mobilization of the workforce and you are liable to pay only for the working days. Thanks to easy communication with real-time data exchange through cloud-based platforms accessible via laptops, tablets and smartphones, there is a major spurt in offshore hiring. Also, continuous overtime and pressure often result in low productivity and poor service quality in the long run thus affecting your human capital. By hiring temps, you will be able to lower the burden on your permanent employees and make use of modern technology.