Adjacent Countries

I enjoy the fruits of travel, but hate the process of it. The process numbs me at best, and gets me surly at worst. The family knows that, so I applaud their bravery in getting me to take then to the Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Tiger Temple in Thailand for a holiday. I’ve traveled with the same agent for a while now and threatened surly consequences if things didn’t go as per plan. So I know they did their due diligence and chose the vendors with care before I embarked on my offshore journey.

I was shocked at the contrast.

We reached Cambodia, a smaller country, a poorer country, a country with a more tragic history, and a pleasure to be in. As we reached the airport and met the guide, we asked what the plan for the stay was, and he knew every detail until we were to leave. We were taken to the hotel where the hand-off was perfect, because the guide had called up as we were landing to coordinate the entire value chain. We asked for flexibility in changing the program and it was easy because the person knew who was involved in the change and coordinated it to perfection. We decided to switch the first day’s agenda to the second day and with a smile everyone involved agreed with our right as a customer to change our mind. Behind the scenes there was coordination between the guides, the transport, the restaurants and the hotel to accommodate the changes and it was impeccable because everyone seemed to know how to pick us up and from whom and where to leave us next, and with whom. When we changed one part of the schedule the rest of the chain adapted seamlessly because it was connected. We didn’t have to pay extra for the most, but when we did, it was done cheerfully because we recognized that we were going to be in safe hands throughout. We were paying to change the process to where we wanted it to be, not for tweaking one of its components. We saw and spent more than we’d planned but it was on our schedule and it was all good. I will go back.

Then we left for Thailand, and the surly expression that comes on me at most airports stayed through the trip. The lady at the airport had no idea when the car would arrive. She’d met her SLA by meeting us outside immigration and had no visibility to the next stage of our travel. When we got into the car after a wait, he drove us to the hotel where he handed us over to the front desk, where we were told there had been a problem with the reservation. The flight had been delayed, and since we hadn’t shown up as per our reverse SLA the rooms had been given to other guests. Of course the hotel was not to blame, neither was the car, nor the person who picked us up at the airport. They’d all met their SLAs. Of course I could take the whole family back to the airport and ask the airline for recompense since that was where the process seemed to have been broken. Never mind I was not going to take two 70 year old ladies across town to argue with a nameless airline official. Of course I paid extra for the upgraded room that was available in their “sister” hotel, but it was not a cheerful payment.

The next morning we waited for guide who called up very angry that we had delayed his schedule. I am, at the best of times, not patient. I’d been at the hotel lobby from 6:30 a.m. waiting and this was 7:15 a.m. We exchanged rude unpleasantries until we realized that no one had thought to coordinate the involuntary location shift. Given that we’d messed with the “vendor's” all important SLA we were left to our own devices while the tour went on its own way. We took our own transport and tried to catch up with what was turning out to be a process that had nothing to do with customer satisfaction. Points racked up, we were welcome to collect our penalties at the end of the month from the travel agent back home. It was a visit to a richer country, a country known for its tourism industry, but a visit without soul. I will not return.

I came back in time to write a blog. I hadn’t thought about work over the past week. And then it hit me. Process adjacency wasn’t about banking processes; it was about results that were relevant, change that was inherent, customers that were happy and value that was a fair exchange. The lack of it was a nightmare.

More: Process Adjacency

Artha Shastra Consulting launches manager training programs to enable BPOs win deals better and faster

We put out a press release yesterday to announce three specialized training programs targeted at senior managers in BPOs. The programs are delivered as two or three day workshops involving cross-functional teams from sales, operations and support functions.

• Discovery and Due Diligence: Competing teams are trained on the details and components of a comprehensive discovery exercise and to translate it to a business case.

• Sell Solutions, Not Capability: BPOs are taught to differentiate their solution by building integrated solutions and presenting it to a panel of buyers.

• Plan & Build Product Offerings: Many BPOs want to build ‘solutions’, ‘products’ and ‘platforms’. But without focus and a clear roadmap, these investments will fail. Participants are taken through a detailed product portfolio mapping and planning exercise relevant to the company’s current and planned competencies.

Why should a consulting firm like Artha Shastra offer training programs? Well, we spend a lot of time in our consulting engagements training BPO managers to think and act in new ways. That’s because the outsourcing industry has radically changed from the days when deals were won on generic capability like infrastructure, ability to scale, and quality certifications. Clients today simply can’t afford long and disruptive discovery and transitions. They are looking for vendors with a demonstrated ability to cut time-to-outsourcing. Unfortunately, BPOs aren’t ready for this change – most still sell capability, not solutions.

Our training programs address this changed market need by working with cross-functional teams. The training is centered on the Artha Shastra Framework – a metrics-driven approach that forces BPO solution teams to seek and capture all critical information at the planning stage and anticipate major stress points. Result? Dramatically reduced discovery and transition times during solution development and implementation.

The response to our workshops has been encouraging. To quote from our press release: “The Artha Shastra workshop enhanced the way our teams approach RFPs and solutions. I now see more focus and thinking to better match our solutions to the client’s dynamics,” says Milind Godbole, President-Asia Pacific, Aditya Birla Minacs.

The trainers are Shammik Gupta and Naresh D’Mello – both are highly qualified and experienced, and have run P&Ls at Infosys BPO in the past.

For more information on the training programs, please visit our website or contact Naresh at nareshdm (@) ashastra.com.

Making a practice out of it..

With TARP repayments having started in earnest (see Tarp Transaction Reports), we are having many discussions on building a “banking practice”. Almost as many as we did 18 months ago on people wanting to start “KPO”, and that’s a bit of a relief. You see, it’s hard for an outside consultant to know what KPO one refers to, since clients really don’t have “KPO” processes.  They have customer acquisition, product design and distribution, product servicing, risk management and settlements. Some of these processes involve voice, some involve data entry, but all of them involve an understanding of the business, and therefore some degree of knowledge.

Within the ambit of a “banking practice”, the issue is somewhat reversed. There is the investment bank, the commercial bank and the retail bank. There are asset products, liability products, trading products, payments products and advisory products. Then there’s a front, middle and back office for each of these. Banking consists of a wide variety of practices, actually. So there are no clear cut answers. Yes, there are flavors of the month, and yes, us consultants do read the same reports from Gartner and Forrester, but no, it’s not our job to fob you off with generalities. A personal source of depression for me is to go through RFP responses to clients from a variety of service providers. There is no way to decide contract awards from the documents because there is no differentiation other than the quality of grammar. One of the fallouts of our attrition rates, is even the diagrams in these documents are similar, if not identical. Sharing the same platitudes and cookie-cutter synopsis of analysts across clients will not help differentiation, and that’s one of the keystones of a successful practice, banking or KPO.

Here’s the best short answer that I can come up with, in isolation. What you should do should depend on what your firm’s capabilities are and what your firm’s market access is. Maybe we are old fashioned, but sticking to the knitting is a great way to expand. The trick is to stay with process adjacency. The beauty of process adjacency is that you can, over time, expand the scope the processes to any direction, as long as you follow the discipline of looking at the next adjacent process in the direction you want. We’ve guided providers from customer service to account maintenance and there on to account opening as a means of opening the client acquisition niche. Others have gone from customer service to payments and thereon to securities processing. Still others have gone from sales to application processing to credit models and underwriting.

This doesn’t happen in isolation however. To help you, we need to understand you, the service provider and your operating model, where the competency clusters are, and then extend these out to create a logical product offering. Depending on the starting point, this may be a horizontal offering (say risk, and yes that is a flavor of the month), or banking product specific (say securities processing, another flavor). These in themselves are wide areas, so the initial expansion may be in pre-settlement processing, or fund accounting, or client acquisition. The key is, it’s a wide enough market out there for the offering to fit in with your cluster competence, and if properly thought through, still be immensely profitable.

Productization is not easy. It is far less expensive than most believe, but it takes strategic intent and a willingness to invest time and effort. It is necessary to test the validity of the scope with the market. Therefore your access to potential anchor clients becomes a key success factor. Understanding the depth and breadth of your conversations with the market, helps to hone the list of potential clients to create a more robust offering. As entrepreneurs, we understand the value of investment dollars and want to help maximize profitability by building in check points during the product (or practice) development life cycle. These checks cannot be built from an ivory tower. To get to product profitability within a reasonable time frame, it becomes important to know who you can talk with early, and then help raise the pitch of that discussion. We need, therefore, a sense of your market access.

So please, work with us. Yes, we can give you the flavor of the month, but that does not make a successful, sustained practice. We need more than the latest Gartner report to set you up for success.

(More information on product selection methodology)

(More information on product portfolio workshops)

Trading thoughts..

As a banker for many years, I dealt with ultimate commodity, money. We were trying to grow the investment banking arm of the then largest bank in the world, in India. Building a business meant winning more transactions, having a more robust pipeline and playing towards the top of the league tables to create scale and the ability to deliver more robust distribution and execution. We realized early that the way to win business was not to give fancy nomenclatures to our tools of the trade (earnings models, DCF, options valuations, capital asset allocation - and yes, we built these into the black boxes they are today), but to use them effectively to understand not just the customer but primarily, what our commodity could do for the customer’s financial statements. We were bankers, so we knew our financial models, but not of the pharmaceutical, retail, hospitality, food or manufacturing industry. We did, however, have friends and family in these other professions and where we didn’t; we used experts to understand their business, not from the perspective of replicating it, but from the perspective of understanding its value drivers and adjusting our cash flow and M&A models to accurately dimension the benefits of working with us. And we had friends and family in the technology and the BPO industry (largely call centers then) who taught us willingly, knowing we would take our learning and adapt it to their business for mutual benefit.

And in a time of great learning, hard work and tremendous fun, we did use our learning, adapt it to their business, gave sound advice and helped companies grow through acquisition, capital market access, private placements and risk diversification. The models were not theoretical, but created value for us as a bank and for our customers as intelligent users. I had fun, and would like to believe I was a good technology banker.

Then I changed industry and for some years, I’ve dealt with the penultimate commodity, talent. We took generic educated resources, provided them with good infrastructure and good transition and operations skills and set about creating scale in search of the virtuous cycle of scale in BPO. We gave our nomenclatures of ISO, 6-sigma, Lean, FMEA, CMM to the tools of the trade and we leverage our friends and family in other industries to generate business. Somewhere along the way, though, I believe this industry focused so much on hiring, infrastructure and generic “scale” that we’ve ignored the customization or the “skill” side of the equation. We continue to represent our business to customers in our generic nomenclature in all discussions. Take my two favorite examples – I’ve never known a bank to break its functions into voice, non-voice and KPO, but we do that for them constantly. And therefore out of the standard 178 page RFP response, 8 pages are dedicated to the customer and her industry, and 170 to generic quality, people, BCP and vague promises of 6-sigma.

It’s not that we don’t have friends and family in the banking (or other industry) sectors. It’s not that people have been not been willing to teach. I wonder then, why the development of industry specific models is not as common in the BPO business as it was in the banking world? The models work. We know what value our commodity adds in terms of the banks’ value drivers (visit us here for details). Could it be that everyone is having fun with the way things are? There has been celebration of the BPO industry’s initial success and growth. Sure, as BPO deals get more complex and harder to come by the BPO industries smiles at its early success are turning a little strained. After all that’s the price of being in the commodity business.

And fun for the financial institutions? By asking providers to bid for business through captive purchases, or feet to fire on unknown productivity gains or equating a mortgage processor to a fund accountant, they are using their commodity trading skills to trade the penultimate commodity and laugh their way to the …. um.. bank?

Visit us at www.ashastra.com for more.

Why Artha Shastra?

Our name, Artha Shastra Economic Consulting Pvt Ltd (www.ashastra.com), is inspired by the Arthashastra, the ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy authored by Chanakya (also sometimes known as Kautilya and Vishnugupta).

Chanakya (c. 350 - 283 BC) was a professor at Taxila University and later the prime minister of the Maurya Empire, and is considered one of the earliest pioneers in economics and political science. The Arthashastra discusses monetary and fiscal policies, welfare, international relations, and war strategies in detail.

In the western world, Chanakya is sometimes referred to as "The Indian Machiavelli". Odd, because Chanakya predates Machiavelli by about 1800 years.

And no, there's nothing Machiavellian about our intentions. Our name is just a tribute to Chanakya, the savant. Like him, we too not only advise but implement.

Introducing Artha Shastra, a next gen outsourcing-offshoring consultancy

Artha Shastra is a new kind of consulting company operating at the intersection of banking and BPO. We are based out of Bangalore, India, and work as trusted advisers and implementation partners to both buyers and providers of outsourcing services.

Artha Shastra consultants are industry experts who have held leadership positions in investment banking, consulting, and BPO and service delivery organizations. These consultants work with a network of partners to implement the Artha Shastra solutions—our partners include some of India’s largest and most reputed BPO firms and delivery organizations.

If you are a bank looking to outsource and optimize your processes, Artha Shastra can advise you on what to outsource, when to outsource, how to evaluate risk, how to transition, how to manage, and how to govern the outsourcing process.

If you are a provider of business process outsourcing services, Artha Shastra can help you prepare your proposal, structure a solution, and train your delivery and support teams. We can help you create banking products, processes, and tools that enable easier offshoring.

Visit us at www.ashastra.com for more.