Driving Innovation with Global Sourcing
The Client
Our client, a worldwide leader in networking and communications products, is known for its commitment to technology innovation and thought leadership. Maintaining its position as a leader year after year, in a rapidly evolving market, can be a challenge. While on the one hand, the organization had to meet customer demands for best-of-breed technology products, on the other, it also had to effectively manage its own operations, spread across geographies.
Business Need
Apart from its core competence in networking equipment, our client offers a range of products to transport data, voice and video through networks spread across various distances. The cost of manufacturing such products is quite high. Moreover, the company has to ensure effective integration of services across geographies. The business needs range from continuous innovation in product development to managing customer relationships and cultural differences across locations. Before the company adopted the outsourcing model, it used to mainly rely on contract workers for all its IT-related requirements. This contractual approach was not just expensive, but was also questionable on its level of efficiency and stability.
Our Solution
The relationship that began six years ago has evolved from partial outsourcing to an end-to-end strategic partnership. Being a hardcore technology company, the client's expectations and standards of technical competence were fairly high. Initially, the company decided to outsource only a small part of its functions. But as confidence in our ability to deliver grew, we became a key partner across all functions such as:
- IT Support: Production support and all kinds of development and maintenance work
- Product Engineering: This involves development of products on various technical domains such as VoIP, Network Management, Optical and Routing technologies
- Infosys’s team actively participates in creating product blueprints and their realization
- BPO Services: For the past three years, Infosys BPO has been providing complete backoffice support on a number of processes — these include order management, customer support, maintenance contracts and other service operations
- Consulting: The impact of this partnership can be seen from the fact that Infosys has gradually moved from handling regular outsourcing work to participating in strategic initiatives and thought leadership through Infosys Consulting
The success of Infosys in managing end-to-end functionality has been powered by its Global Delivery Model (GDM). A special Governance Model has also been created to monitor the progress across all functions.
Benefits
Over the years, the client has benefited from this relationship in a number of ways:
- Product engineering services have assisted in top-line growth by enabling the design of products in a faster and more cost-effective manner
- Over the past three years, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been reduced by more than 45%
- BPO services have taken over a large part of customer management functions. This has helped achieve a high level of customer satisfaction for order management, making it the only such center across the organization. This has helped achieve high level of customer satisfaction for order management making it the only such center across the organization
- Integration of operations and IT has enabled faster implementation of changes, as requirements can be gathered and understood better
- Better utilization and management of resources allows the client to focus on its core competence areas
- Process improvement and technology-enabled initiatives have resulted in overall efficiency and improved knowledge management within the company
By creating an end-to-end operations management infrastructure, Infosys has not only helped the client scale down its costs, but has also helped improve the company's competitiveness by allowing it to focus more on innovation and other long-term strategic activities.