my daughter was an unpaid intern at a company for 3 months while pursuing her BA. when she got her degree, they hired her as a regular employee doing the same job. the employment contract she had to sign says that if she leaves the company in the first year, she has to pay back $1000 for training costs (to be deducted from her last paycheck). is this legal? and how do they justify it when she was trained as an intern? any idea how to go about dealing with her management over this issue?

It is legal and not uncommon. Now that she is leaving (?) is not to time to deal with it. That was when she was negotiating the contract. She signed the contract and there is little recourse.

So, just over a year ago my parents bought me a Dell Studio XPS (Vista 64 bit) with speakers and sub-woofer. This system came already loaded from the manufacturer and had everything pre-installed. So, two days ago I contracted a nasty virus that blocked all programs. My only option was to re-install. Besides having graphics issues with my 24" monitor, my sound system isn’t working properly.

The problem is that when I plug in headphones the computer doesn’t recognize them and sound still plays out of the speakers. I have everything still plugged in the same way before I reinstalled (I used headphones then), but for some reason they just aren’t working. Also, before I had to re-install I had Realtek speaker management, or at least I think I did. The program allowed me to edit the speakers and such, which I believe was Realtek. Since I re-installed, this program isn’t here anymore. I think this may be my problem, but I don’t have any software that came with the computer to install the program. It came with the computer, which I didn’t set up.

Do I have any options?

Log onto Dell’s site, download the correct audio driver for the model computer you have, once you reboot, the Realtek audio software should be there and should allow you to configure the headphone jack to mute the external speakers when in use.

Having come a long, long way from its origins as a vegetable oil production company, Wipro is now one of India’s largest IT services firms, with nearly 100,000 employees worldwide and 2008 revenues in excess of $5 billion. Wipro BPO, the company’s business process outsourcing arm, was created in 2002 with the acquisition of BPO trailblazer Spectramind and has since become one of the foremost BPO providers in India. Wipro BPO’s head Ashutosh Vaidya took over at the top in April 2008 having previously headed up the parent company’s computing arm Wipro Infotech. In this exclusive interview Vaidya looks at how the origins of Wipro BPO have shaped its operations - and the Indian BPO sector in general.

SSON: To what extent do you think Wipro BPO’s operations – either in its present incarnation or earlier as Spectramind – have had an influence upon the manner of the development of the BPO space in India?

Ashutosh Vaidya: You know, Spectramind which Wipro bought was one of the pioneers in India’s IT industry, so it really has been a role model of sorts for third-party agencies. And to that extent I would say that a lot of people would have seen this approach from Wipro as being a sign of the maturity of the market. If you go back in history, when Wipro picked up the Spectramind business, a lot of the big Indian software players were not involved in the BPO industry. The Indian IT services industry is dominated by Wipro, TCS and Infosys. The BPO industry in India started off as a call center industry. It did not have the appearance of an industry that was going to grow big and contribute to value-add; I think all that started when Wipro invested in Spectramind. It gave a very clear signal to the market that this is an industry with a lot of potential and therefore this is a serious business, and not something small, unorganized; this is something that will grow, that requires solidity of management and thought-leadership to take it forwards.

SSON: Conversely, to what extent has the acquisition of Spectramind affected both the kind of business Wipro BPO carries out, and the way in which it operates?

AV: If we had not seen this [BPO] as a strategic business, we wouldn’t have gone there. We saw this as a good opportunity and we’ve seen this borne out over the years. The business has grown rapidly, and we’ve transformed the business. Wipro needed a head start, so it was a good idea to pick up a going concern, and then bring in our talent, and our contacts and our established position in the market to make it grow much faster.

SSON: What do you see as having been the biggest changes to the outsourcing space during your time in the business?

AV: When you look back at the outsourcing industry, it used to be call centers, and predominantly it was outbound business so you were calling up customers, and a lot of those calls were sales calls. When Wipro came in, we looked at the scenario and figured that if you looked at the overall business scenario of any customer you would find a substantial proportion of work that could be outsourced. When you call that work “business process outsourcing”, customer care or customer support – while still “process outsourcing” – is not the only work that could be outsourced. Every business runs multiple business processes, and if you’re a true business process outsourcing company, you should be able to go to your customer and say “there are many more things that I can do for you, much better, much cheaper”.

Now predominantly until the late ‘90s this used to be just two processes: sales outsourcing, when people make outbound sales calls; and customer support outsourcing, when you take calls from customers and sort their issues. And from there, when Wipro picked up Spectramind we thought that this should really be expanded into a variety of businesses, and then you see the genesis of the non-voice-based processes – because while customer support and sales are both voice processes there are plenty of things you can do for a customer which are non-voice.

For example if a customer has an accounts payable process going on, you could very well outsource that, and do a completely efficient job for a customer taking care of accounts payable – or accounts receivable. What Wipro did was it expanded the scope of outsourcing from the simple voice-based telesales and customer support to a broader horizon that includes HR, procurement, financial accounting, legal, marketing support…

So this is one of the biggest differences that Wipro brought about: we increased the scope, went out to the customers and explained what we could do for them, and built the business around that. Over the last years our business has grown manifold, and we have added – apart from the initial basket of voice-based services that we picked up – a strong portfolio of processes including those from finance and accounting, HR, procurement, legal, knowledge processing, investment banking – you name it. As long as there is a process, we can outsource it. That’s been our approach to life – and that’s a change that Wipro brought to outsourcing.

SSON: What do you see as being the biggest challenges to (a) the BPO industry and (b) the outsourcing industry in general, over the next few years, and how do you plan on positioning Wipro BPO to overcome them?

AV: My sense is that a lot of business process outsourcing – and I think things are changing, but haven’t yet – is still “my mess for less”, meaning that you completely lift and shift the process as it’s being done in your organization and move it to a low-cost destination, be it India, the Philippines or somewhere else. So if it is a messy process in the client’s organization, you pick it up and run it as-is in your destination – so basically you just get an advantage of the labor arbitrage.

But there’s a lot more to [outsourcing] than that and Wipro has been expert in using optimization techniques like Lean Six Sigma etc; if I pick up a process running at our customer’s site, potentially without tinkering with anything – without transforming the process itself – we can bring in efficiencies and do a lot of the process in a much better way. So initially you pick up the process as-is, then you look at the process and see where are the areas of inefficiency that are non-value-add – and without changing the overall process I can do a lot of smaller efficiency changes.

Now the biggest challenge comes when we want to transform the overall process – so we go back to our customer and say “the process itself can be changed; the basic fabric of the process needs to be reworked” so that while you define a given input and expect a given output the way it is done can be transformed so it is done much more efficiently. It is time for business process outsourcing companies to do some transformation of the business process, and not only give their customers the advantage of cheaper labor, and greater efficiency, but move them into a domain to say “we will transform your business processes”. I see that as a big challenge.

Because to do that, there are lots of things that need to change on the customers’ side. Sometimes it may involve changing IT; sometimes it may involve changing the way they are structured. The challenge is to go back to customers and identify – and tell them – the areas which are causing business processes to be slow, or inefficient; and then work with them to make sure that you eliminate those problem areas, transforming the business process itself so that the whole thing can be done much more smoothly and much faster. This involves work not just in the outsourcer’s organization, but in the customer’s organization; we need to help them effect change management, and implement the change.

We are working very hard to make sure that we go back to our customers and do that – and we’re proud that Wipro is one of the best-placed organizations to do it, because not only do we do BPO; we have very strong IT and business consulting practices, so we will be able to go to customers and say “look at your process; is there an IT change required? Is there a business change required?” Wipro can look at the entire process and handle it end-to end, and we can suggest both technology people and process changes.

SSON: What is your strategy for maximising Wipro BPO’s resistance to the current economic downturn and what effects do you think that downturn will have on your business?

AV: I think the current economic situation is actually leading customers to look at their businesses in a very focused manner, to look at areas of cost and take out those costs; more and more customers are looking at stronger ways of doing business and at ways to take out cost. If you look at industry statistics, and research from people like Gartner and Forrester, you’ll find that only about 15-20 per cent of work that can be outsourced has so far been outsourced. Most customers still do a lot of work in house. When you give work outside, there is the potential of making the process more efficient, and there is the potential of taking out cost. That is how the outsourcing industry has been working for however many years.

My sense is that the economic downturn will encourage a lot of people to take a very hard look at what is going on within their organizations, and as they look at opportunities to take costs out, they will identify more and more non-core processes which do not offer them a benefit by retaining them inside – and all they need is that these processes should be done more efficiently, so they will look for people outside to do these jobs for them. Outsourcing engagements normally take three to six months to crystallise; if you start talking to an outsourcer today, it might take from three to six months before you’ve analysed the vendor, got into a contract with them, and the work’s started being done. More and more customers will now start talking to vendors; these dialogues will start happening now, and over the next three to four quarters you’ll see a lot more outsourcing happening.

SSON: How important a role will KPO play for your business in future, and which – if any – sub-sectors of KPO (ie, LPO, financial research etc) will take priority for you strategically?

AV: The interesting thing about KPO is that you shouldn’t look at it as a standalone; KPO to me is the direction-setter which will say what other processes within the company can be outsourced. If you take something simple like business analytics; you may want to do a lot of data analysis and a lot of business analysis to figure out who are your key customers and what you need to do for them, etc, and a lot of people would say that that’s KPO. The fundamental of it is that the data you’re working on has to be clean. If you don’t have clean data whatever analysis you do on it will have very faulty results. Therefore in order for you to get good business results out of a KPO, you need to do the basics right: you need to make sure that the underlying work is done in a systematic manner; the data is clean; and so on. And that is the job of the BPO industry.

When you go to an outsourcer, you clean up the data, you do transactions, you collect more and more information about the customer, you build up the database and so on. And that database can then be used by KPO; KPO again in turn can look at the data and come back and say “this is what we can do more for our customer” – and it becomes a virtuous circle. Good solid BPO can clean data so that it is ready for effective KPO; and once you do effective KPO it will tell you what other opportunities exist within your business. I am of the firm belief that you do not look at KPO as a standalone business, but look at it as something that is a good value addition to the intrinsic business process outsourcing that you’re doing. And this can happen in any business area: you can do it in HR, in finance and accounting, in investment banking, in customer relationship – the top-end analytic business domain, that work, will become the KPO part of the business, and the rudimentary transactions and day-to-day business will become the BPO, and these two should work together. KPO needs to work in a hand-in-glove manner with the BPO.

SSON: So would you consider, say, LPO to be a separate entity in itself and not one that comes under the umbrella of KPO?

AV: Again let me say that LPO itself, if you look at the entire gamut of work that will happen in the legal sector, there’s a whole lot of work that can be done by people who are not lawyers. Research, analysis, proofreading of documents: some might call that KPO, others BPO, and somewhere the boundaries get blurred. You may need some very high-end legal team, to do high-end work, but there’s a whole lot of work underneath that can be done by, let’s say, a team of graduates who don’t need to be lawyers, who just need to be told what to do. The “heavy lifting” will be done by the BPO part and the thought-leadership piece will be done by the KPO part. And this is the same for every domain be it legal, finance and accounting and so on.

SSON: Let’s move on then. Where, geographically, do you see likely expansion for Wipro BPO in the next few years? Why?

AV: We’re looking at strategic advantages and a practical footprint. Our approach is that for three or four different reasons. One is language. Second is geographical proximity. Third is understanding cultural and business mindsets. Fourth is process variation. Customers are looking for vendors who can provide services from multiple geographies. If you are looking at BPO for a global customer, a vendor is required to set up outsourcing processes in multiple geographies. Language, culture, business mindsets, the requirements of privacy laws etc will make sure that you do have your business set up in a lot of countries.

At Wipro what we have done is that we have selected a few centers where we think that we have the potential for a significant amount of growth in terms of low-cost manpower with high-quality work, so for us that is – apart from India – China and the Philippines, and Eastern Europe: we already have centers in Poland and Romania. Plus we have just opened up a center in Curitiba, Brazil, to be able to enter that market. If you look at Curitiba, Eastern Europe (Bucharest and Warsaw), India, the Philippines, and Shanghai and Chengdu in China, these centers cover 95-97 per cent of the world’s languages, fall in almost every timezone, give proximity to all the continents – and this allows us to do work taking care of data privacy and other laws of the European Union. So we have our footprint covered – and this is what I call our strategic gameplan in terms of seting up centers. In addition, sometimes a large customer may require a small near-time footprint for them, so we do set up practical centers close to our customers’ locations, and expand. So we will set up as required by some of our large customers and as their needs dictate.

SSON: What are your ambitions for Wipro BPO over the next few years?

AV: Growth and more growth. I see us growing 30, 35 per cent year on year. We hope that the impact of the economic slowdown will be limited, and we hope to grow as rapidly as possible. In that growth what we are looking to do is make sure our growth is not linked to headcount growth, so we are able to grow our revenue faster than we are able to grow our headcount. We want to put up a whole lot of non-linear initiatives to make sure that our revenue growth is faster than our headcount growth.

SSON: Finally, what do you see as having been the most important lessons that you have learnt during your time in the business?

AV: What I’ve seen is that in the outsourcing business a contract with a customer is typically three, five, seven years, so it’s very important as a customer to get into a good, trusting relationship with a vendor. As a vendor you must become a trusted partner with your customer bringing thought-leadership and solutions.  We should not be looking merely at the way a customer is doing a process; as I pointed out earlier, we must look at entire end-to-end solutions using all our expertise – IT expertise, process expertise, people expertise – to bring in the solutions to help our customer. Unless we are bringing all those things to the table we are restricting our value-add to the customer – and in this long three-, five-, seven-year relationship we must continually be bring in benefits for the customer so that their business grows, and in turn they feel it is important to keep working with Wipro.

More Articles: Want to receive more articles like this? Have a tip, learning or case study you want to share?
Join our growing community of shared services and outsourcing professionals.

Jamie Liddell
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/sourcing-superstars-ashutosh-vaidya-wipro-bpo-676422.html

It will all start with some negotiations. You and the service providers should come to an agreement regarding the cost of their services and the amount you are willing to pay for the whole project. If you want to get high quality and efficient service, you must be willing to pay a fair amount of money for it and service providers must deliver excellent services if they want to be compensated well.

Then you can proceed with the structuring of the BPO contract. This will include the terms, conditions, and principles of the whole project. You will have to make sure that the terms in the contract are fair for both parties so both you and the providers or vendors will agree with every little details and conditions that are stated in the contract. If this works well, this could lead to a long-term partnership between you and the providers.

If you are planning to outsource a group or a team, it would be better if you could clearly state the transitioning process for employees and management. You must make sure that the employees can understand and recognize the person who will be in charge of the whole team. This will prevent any confusion among employees regarding the new management. Hand over the business duties and responsibilities smoothly and properly to the right people and make sure that they are highly skilled for the job to avoid any trouble or problem in the future.

You should also state a clear, definite, and distinct benchmark that will let you assess and evaluate the service provider’s overall performance and to make sure that the quality of his work will meet your standards and requirements. It would be better if you could also include the measures or things you could do in case your provider fails to meet set standards and requirements.

It is also important that you will set a time frame or a deadline for the completion of the whole project. This will mean that the provider has to finish the whole project within that given period of time. Just make sure that you allow enough time to make sure that the quality of the job will not be compromised because of a rushed project. You can state a consequence or a measure when the provider fails to meet that deadline. It is also important that you include your full project governance to make sure that everything is going smoothly.

Doing this could help you evaluate if outsourcing the work or job is better for you and your company. It could also help you determine if a certain provider will be a good asset to the company and you could base it on his performance if you are going to keep him and offer him more projects in the future or you should find another provider for the job. Hiring a group of service providers could also help you pick an individual with an excellent performance and delivers high quality works.

Max Info
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/making-a-bpo-contract-736849.html

Franchise operations manuals may seem daunting, especially for a company that has never written an operations manual before. Bewildered by the new business of franchising, with its legal requirements, franchise disclosure documents, operations manuals, training programs, etc., many companies delegate responsibility to a high-priced franchise consultant.

But using someone to write your franchise operations manual who knows literally nothing about your business, never makes any sense when everything is considered objectively. And, besides a hefty price tag of $20,000 or more to write the manuals, using franchise consultants brings another, expensive result – legal risk. Here are some drafting tips and strategies from a recognized, international franchise expert.

Why Franchise Consultants Are Risky Business
Paying someone who knows nothing about your business, and having them learn it from scratch at your expense is really just common sense. Using franchise consultants for what is a relatively easy and straightforward task has never made any sense – except to the franchise consultants who charge exorbitant amounts to write an operations manual. It’s one of those little franchise secrets that the consultants don’t ever mention or discuss.

Using a franchise consultant to write a franchise operations manual also carries legal risk. The principal legal risk comes from including inappropriate topics, chapters and policies that are commonly found in company-owned, chain operations manuals.  If these are included, as they often are in franchise operations manuals, very significant franchise liability issues arise. Because the franchise consultants are not franchise attorneys or experts, they are entirely oblivious to this risk. They don’t know where the bullets come from in franchise litigation. As a testifying and consulting franchise expert, I routinely find franchise operations manuals drafted by franchise consultants and do-it-yourself manuals containing inappropriate chapters or topics. And, because they rely on boilerplate manuals used for other clients, where (hopefully) all instances of burgers, for example, are searched and replaced with tax returns, the end result is not only dangerous – it is also very mediocre. Giving a mediocre operations manual to a franchise owner who has invested hundreds of thousands (or in some cases millions) of dollars in your franchise model is definitely not the best way to start or ensure a smooth franchise relationship.

The Best Practice Approach To Drafting Franchise Operations Manuals
Besides the expensive and legally risky approach there is another, best franchise practice approach based on almost three decades of writing, editing and reviewing hundreds of franchise operations manuals. The essence of this approach is also common sense – letting the true expert in your business write the manual. Typically that person is the founder of the business, or a small team of management personnel who know business operations inside and out. While a franchise expert should be involved in the process, the expert’s role should be limited to a planning and editing capacity.

Three Easy Steps For Drafting A Franchise Operations Manual
The drafting process begins with planning and developing the Table of Contents for the franchise operations manual. This includes making sure all the appropriate chapters and topics are included, and the inappropriate ones are not. Knowledge of franchise management best practices is essential here, and that’s why a franchise expert’s input and planning is so important. Because most franchise operations manuals are incorporated by reference in the franchise agreement (which is a franchise industry best practice)  the franchise contract is also  reviewed.  Some operations-specific information may be inadvertently included in the contract by the attorneys, which is not a good thing. This needs to be moved out or appropriately amended.

The second step is giving the person(s) within your company who have drafting responsibility samples of operations manual writing styles, guidelines and instructions. With these, they can begin drafting each chapter of the manual using their extensive operational knowledge of the day-to-day, week-to-week, etc. aspects of your business.

The third and final step is having the franchise expert review each chapter as it is drafted and comment on the professionalism and sufficiency of the chapters from a franchise industry best practices and franchise operator perspective.

Summary
The first couple chapters are typically the hardest to draft, as you or your management personnel learn and apply operations manual drafting techniques under the guidance of a professional editor. But after that, it’s smooth sailing through the balance of the document. This approach produces a professional, easy to use and update franchise operations manual. It also ensures the most efficient use of resources and talent, and eliminates having to pay a franchise consultant $20,000 or more for this relatively simple task. Whether or not a company ultimately franchises, the process of planning, documenting and implementing standardized operating procedures and systems via operations manuals, like blue chip franchise and non-franchised companies do, makes any firm operate more efficiently and competitively. In a franchise environment, it ensures consistent and uniform operations, helping personnel with different skills learn to perform tasks in a consistent manner throughout the franchise network. Finally, it’s important to realize the process of writing a franchise operations manual never stops. As the business model evolves, so must the operations manual – the ultimate reason why writing the manual yourself to begin with makes imminent common sense. As one franchise company executive observed “I found that not only was writing my own operations manual a cost savings; it was imperative.”

copyright 2008-2009, Kevin B. Murphy, B.S., M.B.A., J.D. – all rights reserved

For further information, visit the Franchise Foundations website

Kevin B. Murphy, Franchise Attorney, MBA – Mr. Franchise
http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/franchise-operations-manuals-how-to-write-a-franchise-operations-manual-in-three-easy-affordable-steps-701306.html