Update

Banking and telecom can push the outsourcing of document management

Mark Petit, Executive Director, Xerox Global Services, Xerox India discussed the acceptance of outsourcing document management services within large enterprise with Rajendra Chaudhary

Mark Petit, Executive Director, Xerox Global Services, Xerox India

Traditionally document management has been a fairly remained in-doors activity for enterprises. What value does outsourcing of document management brings to the enterprise?

The value proposition that we offer to our clients is based around the document lifecycle and how effectively we manage it for them through our outsourcing services. If we look at a large enterprise, they have multiple internal departments such as operations, sales & marketing, IT and so on, which define how documents are created and managed as per their requirements. However as these documents move from one department to another, there's no uniformity in how it gets treated across all these departments throughout their lifecycle. Nobody looks at the digital layer across the lifecycle of the document in an end-to-end fashion. Because everyone has 'a piece' of the document lifecycle, which is broken in various silos, an approach like this can lead to process inefficiencies, communication inefficiencies and indeed cost related inefficiencies.

With our broad portfolio of services such as outsourcing, consulting, and systems integration we can optimize office document management for our clients, improve productivity, and create value by facilitating integration between people, processes and technology. This is why it makes great sense to outsource document management.

Does enterprises ready to outsource doument management to third party?

I think it's more a question of how ready we are as a service provider here in India. We've been around for 6-7 years here and we've been selling point solutions and services. However, we are now starting to connect those little solutions together in order present in a integrated solution and services portfolio for our customers.

What we see in India is this—historically, the businesses functions and document management related functions are kept separate. Additionally the document functions are carried out by a number of people and if it's an outsourcing arrangement it ends up being a job carried out by an even larger group of people such as the technology supplier, the printing material supplier, and others. Presence of so many participants in the document management process tends to break the process making it a costly and inefficient affair. What we do is talk about the synergy benefits—such as time to market, time to revenue, cross-sell and up-sell, and lowering the TCO. From what I've seen so far the message seems to be going down well at the moment and our pipeline of opportunity has increased in the last few months.

So organizations are starting to 'buy' the message?

The key is communicating with the right person in the company. You go to a 'C' class executive such as a CIO, COO, CFO or even a CEO and you pitch high level savings and process improvement, you get a lot of buy-in. If you can throw some numbers in the mix in terms of savings, you are more than likely to get their attention. But if you don't get your foot in their offices and you go to a fulfillment level person, somebody from the operations or lower down the organization where people don't look across the business, don't really care about the total cost, or they don't realize the business impact of such an initiative, you are most likely to be disappointed. It then becomes a commodity sale and doesn't go anywhere. So getting to talk to the right set of people is the key here.

Which are the verticals that you are most excited about?

Banking and telecom are our primary markets for us. Additionally insurance vertical is looking good because here efficient and timely processing of document holds the key to customer service. Public sector entities, which are sitting on legacy systems and still rely on archaic methods of document management are also very inviting to us.

— Rajendra Chaudhary