Briefing Notes – Wipro’s “Transition as a Service”

Summary

ISG recently received a briefing on Wipro’s Finance and Accounting Outsourcing (FAO) capabilities from its Business Process Services (BPS) team: Pranav Rai, General Manager – Presales, and Nidhi Sahni, Sr. Manager – Business Solutions and Risk. The briefing was part of ISG’s data collection initiative for the upcoming ISG Insights Index (I3) report on FAO.

Our net takeaway: The briefing highlighted Wipro’s service delivery models and offerings, which are based on its process-centric analytics capability and built around its proprietary BPS tool for FAO and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Wipro’s major FAO-related engagements illustrate how and why Wipro is gaining business, including expansion of services to CFO clients interested in incorporating more strategic initiatives.

Briefing Notes

Wipro BPO has been investing heavily in its own proprietary tool to improve back-office business process services. Though Wipro has a well-distributed customer base across different industries, it has had recent success helping large manufacturing and retail clients with highly complex finance and accounting process-related requirements. Wipro BPO provides services that cover a broad spectrum of the transactional F&A business processes, such as procure-to-pay, record-to-report and order-to-cash.

Wipro’s business operations platform Base)))^TM is essentially a technology-enabled process layer that sits on a client’s IT system. It has been pivotal in changing how Wipro provides end-to-end services for F&A processes. Base))) consists of three modules, including:

1. The Analytics Module, Base))) Prism, analyzes the existing business process and identifies areas for potential improvement
2. The Transition Module, Base))) Harmony, includes a process-design repository of pre-defined best practices for service delivery
3. The Operations Module, Base))) Core, handles the “run” side of business processing and manages process workflows.

Base))) Harmony, Wipro’s Transition Module, forms the basis for its new “Transition as a Service” (TaaS) offering, which helps large enterprises that are transitioning to a Global Business Service (GBS) or consolidating their Shared Service Centers (SSCs). The module speeds the design and implementation of GBS and addresses the risks of knowledge management.

The TaaS offering includes the development of service catalogs, a system for knowledge capture, process documentation, performance measurements, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and process harmonization through variance analysis. Wipro worked with a leading global management-consulting firm to develop this offering for a global Fortune 250 manufacturing client that wanted to consolidate its F&A, Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Human Resources (HR) operations from 60 global locations into three GBS locations.

In collaboration with its partner, Wipro leveraged the Base))) Harmony module to help document the existing process and knowledge, study the variances in the process design across countries and design  “future-ready” SSCs. The tool allows the client to map the processes, implement changes and handle exceptions for every region as and when applicable.

Wipro’s TaaS offering is meant to speed clients’ implementation of GBS and improve the transition and stabilization experience. Future plans revolve around enhancing this offering to include standard process assets and models to enable customers to leapfrog the GBS transformation.

Net Impact

Enterprises increasingly expect service providers to leverage their experience regarding best-in-class processes to help them achieve cost reduction and operational efficiency. Clients are also looking for service providers to act more and more as partners and bring a consultative approach to areas like shared services. Innovative delivery models like TaaS help Wipro differentiate itself in the market.

Wipro reports that CFOs are now using Wipro BPO teams to conduct high-end F&A related processes like Financial Planning and Analysis. This is an illustration of what happens when service providers deliver measurable business value in business processes. Clients begin trusting them, expanding the scope of the work and creating more opportunities for client and providers alike.

Summary Facts

• Wipro Limited is headquartered in Bangalore, India
• Wipro has 170,000 employees worldwide with 5000+ employees in its F&A practice
• The company reported a 2015 revenue of $7.6 billion
• It has 1,105 clients worldwide with 54 customers for F&A services (as per Q3 2015 results).
• Wipro BPO core services include Finance & Accounting, Human Resources Outsourcing, Sourcing and Procurement, Customer Management Services, Knowledge Services, Robotic Process Automation
• Competitors: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys BPO, HCL Technologies, Genpact