Winners' Spotlight
The HROA announced the recipients of the third annual 2007 HROA Awards during a gala ceremony that took place during NY HR Week at the Hilton New York, on April 17, 2007. "The HROA Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in human resources," said Richard Crespin, global executive director of The HROA. "This year's winners have demonstrated clear leadership and an ongoing commitment to the advancement and improvement of HR transformation. In each case, they have also fully lived up to the values and mission of the HROA."
We asked our winners to share their thoughts on what makes them, and their organizations, successful. Download the full article below to read their words of wisdom.
Award Winner: Cartus
Award: Relocation Provider of the Year
HCN: What is the #1 thing your company does that helps ensure the success of its clients?
Cartus: The single most influential factor in our success as a partner is sustained superior service. We achieve this through a disciplined approach to ascertaining what our clients and customers really wantâ€"and then measuring against that. First, we ask clients and customers to tell us up front what's important to themâ€"what we call "critical to quality," or CTQs. We also repeatedly survey our clients and their employeesâ€"through an annual client survey and ongoing customer evaluations - to find out what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and how we can improve. Our inspiring purposeâ€"to deliver an exceptional experience to every customer, every dayâ€"spurs us to do our best for our clients' transferees, thereby ensuring smooth transitions to new jobs and homelands and resulting in happier, more productive employees.
HCN: What do you think are the top unexpected problems clients run into when outsourcing and how can you help them avoid and/or solve them?
Cartus: One of the most challenging aspects of an outsourced engagement is the ability for client and provider to work smoothlyâ€"both on a relationship and program management level. This is often difficult when relocation responsibilities have been turned over to "outsiders." Cartus manages this with some proven approaches:
- We work carefully up front to understand the company's corporate culture and establish an atmosphere of shared goals and objectives. A detailed and thorough implementation process and technology that puts client's policies and key "CTQs" at Account Management and consultants' fingertips supports this goal.
- Cartus has the flexibility to tailor its services and solutions to each client's specific needs and the resources to deliver those services. Among the wide variety of approaches we have developed to support effective outsourcing is a total mobility solution that streamlines tracking and reporting and enables us to capture all program costs in a manner that is comprehensive, accurate, and timely. This supports the clients' ability to track budget and program deliverables effectively.
HCN: What unexpected value do your clients receive?
Cartus: Our continuing focus on best practices and unwavering dedication to meeting our clients' needs are exemplified by the following:
Cost savings. Our innovative processes not only contribute to superior service delivery but also result in surprising economies. For example, our unique international freight forwarding model, based on city-pair traffic, saves our clients between 25 and 30 percent in air, surface, and permanent storage costs; our policy analyses close costly gaps in clients' relocation programs; and careful supply chain management means that Cartus Global Network suppliers are selected, trained, coordinated, and monitored by us to maintain and improve quality while lowering costs Our expert consultants also continually recommend policy enhancements and adjustments to make clients' policies more effective, balancing service and cost. The ability to deliver savings on multiple levels has resulted in significant benefits to clients: Over the past four years, Cartus has recommended over $220 million in cost savings to clients.
Thought leadership. Cartus is the leader in the mobility industry. Knowledge leadership resides in the experience of our people and translates into creative, proactive solutions to real-world mobility issues that clients and transferees face. It takes the form of communications that educate clients to best practices and alert them to changing industry trends, as well as complimentary eLearning forums and seminars for our clients. During these sessions, our own experts present information on topics such as tax and legal issues, consulting services, global trends, and relocation fundamentals.
Innovation. From the imminent introduction of Cognos, a cutting-edge, Web-based reporting tool to the debut of an online Virtual Relocation Center, continual enhancements to household goods management that cut costs and improve cycle time, and the ShockWatch labeling system for moving cartons that contain fragile items, Cartus is at the forefront of turning innovative ideas into action.
The proof of Cartus' commitment to deliver the best in innovation and leadership to our clients is perhaps best reflected in the numerous awards we have won from leading organizations: recognition from clients for outstanding service delivery, outsourcing expertise from HROA and IAOP, and training recognition from ASTD and as a member of the Training 125.
Award Winner: Christian Baader, SAP
Award: Person of the Year
HCN: What have you personally done that has made the greatest impact on the success of your clients?
Christian Baader: Kept SAP from becoming a BPO provider and developed an innovative partnering model to constructively engage with select BPO providers. In implementing this model I contributed also in building a cohesive organization including a dedicated team of significant size, that lives and breathes BPO in the context of our software vendor-setup. The impact of this lies in helping BPO buyers to optimize the cost-, quality- and risk-impact of their BPO deal based on the best leverage of our technology.
HCN: What client challenges keep you up at night?
Christian: Helping senior business decision makers on BPO projects to avoid the technology-fallacy: that "because we just buy a service, we either do not need to worry about technology choices or can treat this as merely an IT-discussion only". This fallacy often destroys significant value since processes and IT are not designed in an integrated way from an end-to-end perspective. The result is business blueprints not leveraging technology appropriately and unnecessary technology customization pain, especially at the interfaces between the outsourced and retained organization. Think of what is needed as the application of the "design-to-cost" paradigm on "process manufacturing" with IT being the manufacturing infrastructure.
HCN: What are the top 3 things you always do for your clients to make sure they sleep at night?
Christian:
- Support customers and provider-partners in the deployment and operations of our technology within the process solution in order to extract maximum value out of the BPO engagement and safeguard highest operations and support quality from a technology perspective.
- Keep innovating our solutions in order to enable ever more efficiency and effectiveness in the handling of our customers business processes.
- Support customers and their advisors in their understanding of the operational implications of IT on their BPO deals in order to ensure appropriate consideration from the RFP design onwards.
Award Winner: Steve Shandgold, RPOWorldwide
Award: Thought Leader of the Year
HCN: What have you personally done that has made the greatest impact on the success of your clients?
Steve Shangold: We developed an innovative global recruitment model and invested in a sophisticated infrastructure (which leverages the latest recruitment technologies) and use thorough process disciplines (including Six Sigma) to ensure that our organization can continue to grow and scale, while maintaining consistent, high-quality service levels for our clients.
HCN: What client challenges keep you up at night?
Steve: The challenge of educating our clients on the need to be more proactive in marketing their brand as an employer-of-choice to prospective employees with the same intensity and focus they apply to their products/services. This is especially important in today's recruiting environment. Also, ensuring that our organization continues to find new and innovative ways to secure the best possible talent for our customers, given today's increasingly intense and competitive environment.
HCN: What are the top 3 things you always do for your clients to make sure they sleep at night?
Steve: We utilize an innovative recruitment model which leverages global recruiting centers to access and reach the best available candidates throughout the globe. Through our round-the-clock process, we are able to reach candidates faster, and therefore get them to our clients before our clients' competition. We provide our clients with a competitive head-start. Our business model provides our clients with high-speed, high-quality recruitment, while lowering the total cost of recruitment by using recruitment centers based offshore, throughout the globe.
Award Winner: SAP
Award: Technology Provider of the Year
HCN: What is the #1 thing your company does that helps ensure the success of its clients?
SAP: Reduce the risk of ending up with a service delivery that does not hit the required cost/quality thresholds and is perceived by the buyer as locking him/her in.
HCN: What do you think are the top unexpected problems clients run into when outsourcing and how can you help them avoid and/or solve them?
SAP: IT architectures that do not fully support service delivery constantly crop up. Cost can only be reduced if the provider is able to leverage its economies of scale, optimize processes, and access labor arbitrage - all of which must be enabled by technology.
Common problems are:
- use of solutions that are not global enough (i.e. do not effectively cover certain countries)
- insufficient integration, which results first in ineffective handoffs between processes and between organizations, and, second, in the impossibility of rolling out tools like self-services and analytics
- insufficient best-practice standardization that hampers the extraction of economies of scale but also usually creates inflexibility.
HCN: What unexpected value do your clients receive?
SAP: Innovation, and viability. Making providers and customer think about how technology choices "give processes a leg up" generates a conscious deployment of technology solutions that in turn facilitates the business case (because they understand how to support scale, optimization and labor arbitrage), and avoids obstacles on the way to innovation (because updates to the software can be implemented more seamlessly and therefore innovation can be brought in through the R&D of the software vendor).
Award Winner: Michelle Adelman, Accenture
Award: Provider Executive of the Year
HCN: What have you personally done that has made the greatest impact on the success of your clients?
Michelle: Building the best HRO team in the industry at Accenture. We have an incredibly committed and talented sales, solution management and delivery team. These folks wake up everyday, travel endlessly around the world and work tirelessly to ensure that we are delivering the best of Accenture everyday to our clients - helping to ensure the companies and individuals who entrust their HR processing to us are getting the best of what Accenture offers across outsourcing, technology and process innovation.
HCN: What client challenges keep you up at night?
Michelle: There are 2 major ones. First, how do we help our clients achieve their vision for a global and consistent HR delivery model and "one truth in HR data", while recognizing the complexity and business case challenge of delivering in local geographies.
Second, how do we help HR leadership deliver and measure demonstrable business impact that justifies the ongoing investment in improved HR capabilities. I sometime call it the "1 - 60 rule". I want to see the day when we help HR leadership to move away from having to justify the ~1% of cost that is HR operating costs, and to instead be able to clearly articulate how the capabilities and programs they deliver to their organizations are driving at the ~60% of cost that is the total cost of employment: salaries, benefits, workforce productivity and organization agility. Then we will have moved HR from having a seat at the executive table to being the catalyst that drives business change resulting in higher performing companies.
HCN: What are the top 3 things you always do for your clients to make sure they sleep at night?
Michelle: I'm not sure anyone in this industry is getting much sleep these days! It's critical for me to help our clients never underestimate the complexity of the change and program challenge they are taking on when they choose to set a higher vision and transform HR; to ensure we are bringing all our experience to bear to deliver everyday; and to ensure that we have our eye on the future - and can continue to help our clients evolve and innovate their HR capabilities.