Context

Our client, a major retailer facing difficult commercial conditions, had successfully offshored classic support functions, and insodoing improved service quality as well as achieving a 40% reduction in labour costs.

Outsourcing commercial functions was now on the table, and would be breaking new ground both for this client and their sector. To minimise risk to the commercial engine of the organisation, the CEO engaged Eden McCallum to interrogate and flesh out the assumptions in the offshoring partner’s analysis of what could be outsourced, and design a robust approach to outsourcing specific processes.

Approach

For each process that could potentially be outsoured, we set out to examine the rationale for outsourcing, evaluate the size of the prize, conduct detailed process mapping, and assign risk levels.

Our consulting team, led by experts in organisation and process redesign and offshoring, drew on an expert panel representing specific commercial areas. Working with internal management, change, process teams and subject matter experts we identifed 15% of roles for phased transfer and built the roadmap to implement these. This included the critical prior task of standardising operations that were currently highly divergent between categories.

Impact

The project enabled the client to move forward with this innovative offshoring for their first wave of functions, with a clear roadmap and minimised risk.

The transfer of functions is currently underway and following the roadmap we designed together.

In addition, with our toolkit and approach now successfully embedded, the in-house team has gone on to extend the work into other functions themselves, identifying and setting in motion further transfers.