If unrest broke out where your critical business processes are handled, could your operations continue unscathed? The potential for geopolitical threats, terrorism, communal violence, pandemic outbreaks and other unpredictable situations that can undermine your business continuity seems to be growing daily. Ensuring the optimal design of global services to provide your company a sufficient level of resilience in your delivery network is of utmost priority.
Here are the Top 5 tips for ensuring that your business is affected as little as possible by disruptions.
- Ensure that you have robust disaster recovery plans in place Disaster recovery plans — which must be updated and tested periodically — are critical to ensure the continuity of a global business support model. With the increasing globalization of service delivery, the risk of any incidents (“man-made” or otherwise) is increasing by the day, and companies need to take all reasonable measures to insulate themselves by being prepared. Risks should be considered and evaluated at multiple planes ranging from the specific service delivery center location to city, state, national and regional levels.
- Make sure your global service delivery network is diversified enough
One of the most important considerations while implementing a global network for service delivery and support is to build in diversification. A well-designed, diversified service delivery network can provide a natural hedge against business continuity related issues. Delivery network diversification must be viewed relative to your company’s scale and should consider the entire range of cities, states and countries where you may obtain services. - Revisit your sourcing strategy
Appropriate sourcing strategy is an enabling factor for building resilience in the delivery network. Double check that your sourcing strategy is based on a sound diversification and resilience rationale. Your strategy should consider the distribution of work among qualified service providers, choice of captive versus service provider solutions, split of overlapping scale processes, best-of-breed versus global service providers, and other choices. Like other business strategies, sourcing strategy selection is not a one-time effort. Revisit your strategy periodically to check its alignment with your current business needs and capabilities available in the market. - Consider all internal and external factors when selecting your service delivery locations
Selecting global service delivery locations is a weighty decision even after you have formulated a sound sourcing strategy. Prior to making a decision on a delivery center location, you must consider all of the relevant internal and external factors. This applies regardless of the captive center or service provider whereabouts. Locations should not only be suitable to the nature and type of work being planned for delivery, but should also provide stability and competitiveness. - Continually optimize your services portfolio across locations
Most companies view the undertaking of outsourcing or offshoring as a journey toward achieving competitiveness in delivery cost and quality. Because this path evolves over time in terms of scale and breadth, it is essential that you continually make incremental decisions to optimize the distribution of your portfolio of work across locations, captives and service providers. Instead of viewing decision making as a one-time exercise, be sure to plan for it periodically when you document your long-term strategic sourcing plan.
Building and ensuring the resilience of your global service delivery network is too mission-critical to leave to chance. TPI’s Global Service Delivery experts can collaborate with you to assess your current service delivery scenario, then help you identify and implement strategies to ensure maximum resilience. Contact us today to begin the dialogue.
About the authorDinesh is a highly experienced and well-respected advisor in the outsourcing industry with more than 23 years of experience in management consulting and outsourcing. He works with enterprises to craft sourcing strategies, structure and negotiate complex sourcing transactions and design and implement sourcing governance organizations. Prior to joining ISG, Dinesh worked with Infosys and Accenture, where he led large transition programs and consulted on IT strategy and implementations, business process-reengineering and operational improvement programs. He is a published thought leader and a regular speaker at industry conferences. Dinesh manages the ISG India Business.
