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Contract Expiration: Opportunities and Pitfalls of an End-of-Term Strategy

eSeminar | Category:   Strategy & Business Case  Benchmarking  IT Infrastructure & Applications...

Did you know a typical sourcing contract becomes less and less effective the longer it is in place? This is because most sourcing contracts remain fundamentally unchanged through the course of a sourcing relationship, failing to adapt to fit the changing needs of both the client and the ever-evolving sourcing industry.

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?

The Practitioner's Guide to Shared Services and BPO - Vol. 1

White Paper | Category:   Strategy & Business Case  Business Processes  Outsourcing...

"From an economic perspective, a business case details the associated costs and benefits (both quantifiable and non-quantifiable) of the proposed solution."

Volume 1 is the first of a series of Guidelines for Shared Services and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) developed by Alsbridge to reflect a shared understanding of good practice in developing a business case, organizational design, change management, SLAs and service levels, charging and benchmarking.

This white paper provides guidance on business cases for organizations contemplating a Shared Service or BPO initiative. It can be read straight through, as an introduction or overview, or used on a section by section basis as appropriate. Sections include an outline of the fundamentals of business case design, a description of the points in the Shared Services and BPO life cycle when business case activity is required, and details on the contents of a business case.

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