Industry news

Amey, the UK-based infrastructure support service provider, has scooped an outsourcing contract worth £235 million to provide environment and infrastructure services to Trafford Council.

The services provided will include commercial and domestic waste collections, street cleaning, grounds maintenance and highway services, along with overseeing bridges, street lighting, road safety, furniture drainage and property services. The contract comes into effect from July 2015 and is expected to run for 15 years.

Mel Ewell, chief executive of Amey, commented: “Trafford Council is taking a pioneering approach to the way services are provided and we are delighted to be working with them on this contract.

“Combining these services allows us to support Trafford Council with efficiency savings while ensuring a high quality service is delivered to local residents.”

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Related: Cornwall Council Delivers Ultimatum to BT

Independent analyst and consultancy firm Ovum has released its 2015 CRM Outsourcing Business Trends Survey, revealing new business patterns and client expectations relevant to the world of contact centre outsourcing.

Ovum found that, for the first time since the global financial crisis, a higher percentage of contact centre managers plan on increasing their CRM budgets than those who indicated that their budgets would remain flat or decline. While this is good news for their organisations, it is a cause for concern for third-party suppliers who have relied on winning business by offering their services at a lower cost.

Ovum’s main recommendation for those service providers is to focus on providing excellent customer experience. The survey found that contact centre enterprises overwhelmingly want to increase customer satisfaction first and foremost, ideally while simultaneously decreasing costs and increasing revenues. The suppliers who can offer a service capable of this quickest will be in a prime position to pick up new clients.

The 2015 CRM Outsourcing Business Trends Survey interviewed 200 enterprise contact centre managers in Western Europe, North America and Australia.

You can find further information on the Ovum website.

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Related: ISG Finds Global Outsourcing Market in Decline

As the race to acquire Serco India gets ever closer to finishing, $46 billion global private equity firm CVC Capital Partners has thrown its hat into the ring.

CVC is now competing with Blackstone Group for the acquisition; Blackstone originally sold the unit, formerly known as Intelenet, to Serco for $634 million in 2011, and now the company wants it back.

According to the Time of India, Spi Global, seen as a favourite to acquire Serco India just a few weeks ago, is no longer a prime contender.

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Related: The Race to Acquire Serco India Nears the End

After a poor financial performance in 2014, Serco Group PLC has announced that it is trading in line with expectations so far this year.

Last year, marred by a number of high profile contract scandals, resulted in an overall operating loss of £1.3 billion for the company, causing share values to plunge. Serco’s new CEO Rupert Soames reflected on the year claiming that “having confessed out sins and in taking the punishment, we are now ready to start on the road to recovery”.

2015 has been far from unblemished for the company. In April Serco let another contract slip, after its staff failed to properly sterilise equipment in a hospital in Western Australia.

However, Serco’s C-Suite will be looking forward to the imminent sale of Serco India, valued at $400 million; the company is selling off large parts of its BPO portfolio, as it intends to focus on public sector services from now onwards.

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Read this next: Serco Seeks Redemption after £1.3bn Operating Loss

Vishal Sikka, chief executive of Infosys, has begun to lay down a blueprint revealing how the company will come to be worth $20 billion by 2020.

The plan involves unprecedented dedication to the company’s top 100 clients such as Microsoft, Bank of America and Apple, cutting labour costs through automation and achieving higher profits from services such as consulting.

Earlier in 2015, Sikka announced his intention to personally oversee 1,000 of Infosys’ outsourcing accounts, a project that was said to involve directly management, developing solutions and even writing code where necessary.

We’re yet to see whether the CEO’s “helicopter parenting” approach will prove to be a burden or a blessing for Infosys.

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Related: Infosys CEO to Personally Oversee Outsourcing Projects

After providing East Cheshire NHS Trust with expected savings of at least £1.5 million through HR transformation, arvato has been rewarded with the expansion of its contract with the Trust.

The four-year agreement has been extended to incorporate two new services: the Trust has commissioned “Governance Direct”, a new central governance information portal accessible for all employees, along with a new workforce analysis service.

Some of the money saved through the transformation of Cheshire NHS’s HR services has been directly reinvested back into patient care. 99 per cent of employees at the Trust still deem the HR service to be “good” or “excellent”.

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Related: NHS Struggling to Manage Service Providers

Although Europe is frequently seen as the next big frontier for the major Indian service providers, companies such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS are finding the continent to be an increasingly vulnerable place to do business.

One reason is the euro’s volatility. Furthermore, the top Indian IT firms, previously enjoying growth rates of 25-30 per cent in Europe, are also now struggling due to top customers in the region, such as AstraZeneca, cutting down on their spending.

As a result, the Indian Economic Times has found that revenues for the majority of Indian’s biggest service providers operating in Europe have declined in the last quarter of 2014 and first quarter of 2015.

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Related: Infosys Reveals Blueprint of Plan to Achieve $20 Billion Value by 2020

The Central London Community Healthcare (CLCH) NHS Trust has entered into a strategic partnership with Capita.

The contract, worth £80 million over ten years, will be to provide ICT, HR and Estates Management Services for the Trust.

CLCH is one of the primary healthcare providers for London boroughs including Barnet, Hammersmith & Fulham and Kensington & Chelsea. This partnership will allow CLCH to focus on providing high quality healthcare by having Capita focus on their back office support.

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Related: East Cheshire NHS Expands Successful Partnership with arvato

Bangalore has retained its ranking as the top city for outsourcing in the world, according to a report released by global outsourcing and research firm Tholons.

The Indian city was followed by Manila in the Philippines, a location that recently featured in the Financial Times due to its fast growing economy.

Tholons’ report identifies the top 100 outsourcing destinations for 2015. The top 10 remains largely unchanged since last year, with Shanghai replacing Dublin at number 10 but the other nine staying put. India features six cities and the Philippines has two, with locations in Poland and China filling the remaining slots.

Despite India’s apparent dominance according to this report, the country failed to top the Philippines in the Cushman & Wakefield study "Where in the World? Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) & Shared Services Location Index". Philippines came second to Vietnam, while India ranked a lowly twentieth in the list.

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Related: Vietnam Confirmed as the World’s Top Outsourcing Location

General Election 2015 saw the Conservatives secure a surprise majority in the House of Commons, all but guaranteeing Tory rule in the UK for another five years. What do these unexpected political circumstances mean for the country’s outsourcing industry?

Investment Week has already identified that shares in outsourcing companies operating in the UK have risen since the election. Presumably this is largely due to Labour’s lack of success – the party’s election campaign was seen by many as “anti-outsourcing”, with policy chief Jon Cruddas actively coming out and attacking Britain’s biggest service providers.

Now that Labour has failed to achieve power, confidence in the continued success of these big players has been restored. Not to mention the fact that coalition doubled the government’s use of outsourcing during its time in power, investing £88 billion into the industry – this pro-outsourcing trend is expected to continue.

We’re also expecting to see more outsourcing in the NHS, with hope that the use of third-parties will help to bring more efficiency and innovation to the Service.

Last year, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt assured his critics that his focus was outsourcing and not privatisation: “Using a charity like WhizzKids to supply wheelchairs to disabled children or using Specsavers to speed up the supply of glasses is not privatisation… When the last Labour government used the independent sector to bring down waiting times, that wasn’t privatisation either.”

In their manifesto, the Conservatives also pledged to “raise the target for SMEs’ share of central government procurement to one-third, strengthen the Prompt Payment Code and ensure that all major government suppliers sign up”.

If they come through on this policy, it would be a fantastic, and much-needed, boost for smaller service providers here in the UK. CEO of the National Outsourcing Association Kerry Hallard supported this policy, but warned: “There remains the issue of how many contracts are awarded directly and indirectly.

“Many SMEs work through subcontractors and these cause the bottleneck in payments – so although it all sounds great for smaller businesses, there is currently no guarantee of speedy payment to sub-contracted SMEs working on Government contracts.”

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Related: The Election Manifestos: What they mean for outsourcing