Operational efficiency in recent times has become one of the major talked about issues and a huge amount of efforts are going into maintaining it. One such study was conducted by Redseer to understand and optimize the operational costs of outsourced technology centres for a Fortune-50 BFSI firm. The financial crisis had led to renewed initiatives for cost-optimizing and client was under severe pressure to reduce costs.
Initially, we did a process mapping and understood the end-to-end needs of the organisation. This assessment was done by analysts who were involved in data collection and interaction with industry experts. We then collected the client’s and the peer’s historical cost-data from various sources and then we analyzed the data in different forms. After analyzing the data, we concluded that the data has a lot of common trends in the past few reports.
Comprehensive benchmarking was done at an initial level to analyze various cost factors and the reasons behind it. The study was instrumental in bringing out numerous ways of cutting down operational cost which would serve as a benchmark in one way or other. While conducting the study, we also looked at the global parameters and closely followed the multinationals and their way of operations. A huge amount of inspiration is drawn from there, but great care has been taken in implementing the methodology as per Indian standards. Also, there has been some inclination towards the important standards that were maintained while carrying out the study, so that it is always in coherence with the Indian law system. Thus, this study acted as imparting awareness in introducing new techniques and ways of bringing down the operational cost, but at the same time maintained the operational efficiency so that it doesn’t bring down the gross margins in profitability for the corporations.
Redseer cost analysis model was used to analyse and optimize costs at an extensive level. Several interviews were done by the analysts to understand the problem areas in detail. The analysis helped in highlighting few improvement areas through which several innovative process handling rules were created by the team. While conducting the interviews, a great amount of care was maintained to preserve the authenticity of the information that was being collected and weed out all the biases that could possibly intrude while the interviews were conducted. Also, at the same time, all the respondents were carefully handled and made aware of the purpose of the study so that the information would be more realistic and useful.
Finally, the study was helpful to the client as they were able to reduce the non-salary recurring costs by 25% over a quarter. Also, as feedback from the client, some information was shared in maintaining high operational efficiency and at the same time during some observational period.
