TECHNOVATE: CHALLENGES OF BUSINESS PROCESS OUTSOURCING

It all started when Dinesh Dhamija. A Cambridge University graduate began a

travel agent career in a perfect location in Central London in the late 1970. His agency

was named Flightbookers and it became the first online travel booking services in the

UK. In 1998, thousands of passengers were booking their plights on the website. It was

the era of dot com bloom. Dinesh launched the ebookers and it was separated from

Flightbookers. Ebookers concentrated on growth and expansion and acquired agencies

across Western and Eastern Europe.

Dinesh knowledge of travel agency gave him good sense so when the dot com

mania ended, ebookers was prepared to face the crises. Being an important part of

ebooker’s strategy in 2001, the Technovate that was initially, providing services to the

group exclusively developed and started to create its own travel services by providing

business process outsourcing services to third parties. It also offered certified courses to

those interested to work in the travel BPO industry. In 2004, Cendant, a company with

huge client’s base acquired Technovate and became its captive center. The influx of work

led to Myron Ferro to join Technovate and managed the transfer of process from Cendant

to Technovate.

Technovate was the result of the Prashant Sahni joined ebookers. He noticed that

ebookers had very excessive operating costs. Instead of focusing on acquisition targets,

he shifted to back-office operation that could result in cost savings for ebookers. The

huge operating cost for ebookers led Prashant to consider moving some of Technovate

cost base facilities to a lower cost economy. Moving some of ebookers operation to India

1
was very tempting because it had low wage costs and competent English speaking

workforce. India’s infrastructure was improving rapidly and there are high profile

corporations that relocated their offices to India by either their own subsidiaries or

contracting third parties.

Prashant took some major steps. He acquired a brand new office building,

telecommunications agreement, and computer bandwidth. The terrorist attack in 2001

made the airline industry to standstill but Technovate still yield positive response.

Technovate became an important part of ebookers’ strategy and offered outsourced back-

office services.

In 2003, Technovate was valued US$ 150 million in the Indian business process

outsourcing and had a whole range of contract services, BPO services, and IT services to

ebookers. Now, Technovate has a third party BPO and started providing services to third

clients. It also has the travel BPO education center in India and Canada for people who

were looking to start a career in the travel BPO industry.

1. Process transition is the most critical phase in process outsourcing. What are the
relevant issues?

2
In process transition the relevant issues are

• Setting up an operation from scratch is time consuming and a lengthy

process.

• The systems to be used in the operation must be paralleled to the previous

or existing system

• Transition of processes must be carried out in a stepwise manner like

i. Contracts entry (offline data entry and batch processing), land

product hotel confirmations (email correspondence with hotels to

confirm reservations) and email sales.

ii. Business critical services such as direct customer interaction, real

time execution, and analytical functions

• Attend to other redundancies and uncertainties during the process’

transition

• In outsourcing, it is transferring the “how the business is being operated”

and not simply the numbers or the business in general

• Transition is also concerned with the knowledge transfer and expertise of

the people involved in the process.

• Service quality is also another key issue to deal with

2. In order for outsourcing to be successful, what should transition management plan

look like?

3
 In order for outsourcing to be successful, the transition management

should look like people who would transfer a tree from one site to another place.

The management team must pull out the tree from its roots and must understand

how deep the roots have gone. In creating a similar environment in the outsourced

place, the management team must finds out what kind of soil it is needed for the

tree to grow and bear fruit.

3. How does Technovate fusion philosophy help in providing outsourcing solution?

Technovate fusion philosophy enabled the company to offer

comprehensive solutions in the travel industry. Technovate believed that diligence

report and the transition team were very significant in the business process

outsourcing. For a successful transition, the due diligence of clients’ processes

was very important. Therefore, the transition team had to create a process flow.

The transition team at the same time had to embrace various disciplinary

competencies in the field of operations, quality, finance, and even more

Information Technology. Operations people tackled all schedules and plans while

the IT workforce was responsible with the technology bid value and finding out

how much bandwidth were needed.

When a process was moved to a low cost destination in another country,

the people who would carry the task did not move along with the process. The

new team would take over the outsourced process. The documentation could be

easily transferred but the knowledge and the expertise of the workforce could not

be guaranteed.

4
 Since the quality of service would be heavily affected therefore, services

level agreements and the formal task-level factors for the definition and

management of the transitional process.