“Using these drivers, HP will look to build a competitive advantage by driving efficiency, innovation and value creation for our customers,” says Mr Mudrack, director of business process outsourcing (BPO) delivery for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

HP considers its global delivery capabilities to be one of the strongest value propositions it offers its clients. These capabilities come from 10 BPO delivery centres across the world, including three in India, and one each in Singapore, China, Costa Rica and Mexico. In total, the centres employ more than 8000 people and offer expertise in more than 30 languages.

The first European centre was set up in Spain in 2002; another followed in Poland three years later, and earlier this year a new centre was inaugurated in Romania. The three European BPO centres provide finance and accounting, customer relationship management, payroll and supply chain support to serve the EMEA market.

Client support

“HP provides clients with various options and models of being able to consolidate or outsource their processes to an onshore, near-shore or offshore location. The European centres play a critical role in this as they support all near-shore capabilities for clients,” says Mr Mudrack.

With their multilingual capabilities, the European centres can support both transaction processing and contact centres. They also possess legal and tax processing capabilities, document management, and scanning and financial closure for the region. And, of course, they are critical from a business continuity perspective: with an eye to managing and mitigating risks, HP has allowed for dual site processing in case of unplanned outages in any of its other centres.

Through this model, Mr Mudrack says: “We have managed to drive economies of scale, economies of place, standardisation of processes and operational excellence. More importantly we have innovated and improved upon how we run processes for our clients, which has led to improved customer satisfaction rates.”

More specifically, the consolidation of these functions into the three European centres has had a positive effect on efficiency and competitiveness. It has done this in three key ways.

Seamless integration

First, the European centres complement the global network through their language capabilities. “This allows us to deliver BPO services out of the European centres that integrate seamlessly with our offshoring capability, for example, in India and China. This way, we are best positioned to achieve optimal cost/quality ratios for clients,” says Mr Mudrack.

Second, they provide proximity to the end-user community. “There are three primary end-user communities that HP’s BPO centres support – vendors, customers and HP employees. Having near-shore locations reduces turnaround time while interacting with these communities on queries, resolutions and documents, which in turn has a huge impact on process efficiencies for global BPO service providers such as HP,” adds Mr Mudrack.

And third, they help strike the right balance between near-shore/offshore models. “Over the past 15 years of our BPO journey, HP has gained tremendous experience in obtaining the right mix in its front-end/back-end structure for clients, which has made its operational engine very lean,” Mr Mudrack explains. “A large part of transaction processing – that is language-independent and region-agnostic – is often moved to low-cost locations with the optimal number of staff at the near-shore locations to fulfil client requirements. This has made HP very competitive in its value proposition to clients and has, over time, established HP as a credible vendor in the market.”

Given these gains in efficiency and competitiveness, which have been achieved in a mere four years since HP’s first European BPO centre opened in Barcelona, it is little wonder that the model is being expanded upon. Mr Mudrack says: “We plan to aggressively grow our delivery capabilities in Europe in the next 18 months across our F&A, procurement and supply chain offerings.”