Infosys BPO frees enterprises from legal hassles

BPO

Infosys BPO frees enterprises from legal hassles

The imperative at present is getting legal work done efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before

Usha Prasad

Monday, December 08, 2008

BANGALORE, INDIA: The global financial meltdown has resulted in law departments of corporations revisiting their legal processes and budgets. An area of legal work that is gaining increasing attention is contract management. The current situation has called in for urgent management of contracts and a cleansing effort at global levels to re-assess contractual commitments and risks. The imperative at present is getting legal work done efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.

“Organizations can opt for certain IT products for driving efficiency in contract management. But clamping down on budgets has put organizations in a unique situation. Organizations need to remain agile while also being extremely cost effective; costs in the variable formats being preferred over fresh capital investments,” says Joydeep Mukherjee, Head KPO, and Infosys BPO.

Giving more details, Mukherjee says that the Infosys KPO services consists of multiple tracks and services - Legal Services which looks into contracts, litigation and IP work; Analytics Business, where it does financial analytics, business analytics (covering sales, marketing and CRM); Learning Services - trains people and creates learning solutions.

Infosys Contract Administration Platform (ICAP), Infosys BPO has created its own integrated state-of-the-art enterprise Contract Administration Platform (ICAP) that empowers general counsels, contract managers and all decision makers at corporations and law firms to increase contract visibility and to identify and quantify revenue implications within all contracts across the organization. ICAP is an integrated stack and is the key part of service portfolio.

“With our entire focus being to make our clients smarter, faster and better, what we realized is that at this point of time when a CFO wants to take up an initiative like this and want to understand all the contracts, the traditional route available to them is to go and select a package, says Shah. “This takes about three to six months in selection itself, and then getting that package configured and tailored to meet their requirement takes another six months. They also spend a huge amount like half a million to one million dollars to pay back to the vendor for the package and still suffer the non-capability of uploading the legal contracts to the system.”

“Till such time this initiative is taken, the overall utility and utilisation of a new contract management system will be minimal. So, what we have done is we have come up with an option where we offer the combined entire stack of legal services and contract management application in one go,” he says. “The second option is the hosted option where customers don’t need to invest on anything and straight away use the hosted version of our platform. Our manpower comes along with that. The third option is they give us annuity work.”

Impact of global financial meltdown
“In the last three months or so we have seen a lot of financial instability as well as cash crunch in the knowledge process system. Given that situation, most customers, like everybody else, are actually looking at cost cutting, higher productivity, higher compliance and lower risk appetite, and more watch on what they owe people. It is more control, more checks and balances in place,” says Mukherjee.

“In a situation like this, he adds, two things happen. One, firms actually need to understand how much they are exposed, from a financially and compliance perspective. And also identify revenue generation opportunities and revenue leakage. This usually happens when customers are looking to ensure that their suppliers are providing the best value. Second, the return on investments on some of the services procured are well utilised, things like these would typically be on top of their mind.”

Third, there are several kinds of litigation, which are the direct or indirect impact of the meltdown, Mukherjee says. This is because of third party exposures, kind of defaults that they would have with the third party. All these are going to come for a settlement through a court system,” he explains.

“This situation is across the world today. Here, we would obviously have some kind of change in business dynamics for us. Customers are looking for alternatives and different solutions. They look for solutions where firms like Infosys BPO can actually provide serious transformational journey, where we aim at providing a holistic view of the customer’s future in the next three to five years,” he says.

©CIOL Bureau