Whereas last year companies would not part with their cash and nobody wanted to spend, businesses are now feeling the pinch of the lack of cash and have started to look for ways to get it, which is good for the players in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services industry.
"We are a happy industry compared with other fields. We did not experience decline and did not lose clients last year, we only did not grow as much as expected. With or without the crisis, processes are the same. People still have to pay bills. Sometimes we just advise them and help them implement changes without necessarily doing any BPO. We are still growing; we hope to grow for six to twelve more months in Romania. It depends on the clients and on how their business will perform. Our global target this year is to grow by 10 to 15%," says Pascal Henssen, 39, who took the reins of the local operations of business and technological solutions provider Genpact, the biggest player in local BPO by number of employees, almost three months ago.
The Dutchman is chief operating officer of Genpact Europe, a position from which he supervises the service centres in Romania (Bucharest and Cluj Napoca), Poland and Morocco.
BPO processes are the non-core processes in a company. For instance, a consumer goods producer will outsource financial, human resources or logistics operations, to focus on its core business, manufacturing.
The BPO industry is one of the best barometers to get the feel of the economy, because it reflects every decline in the business of the companies for which it works.
"On short term, all the companies in the world halted projects and focused on identifying steps to help them mitigate the effects of the crisis. Nobody wanted to part with their cash and nobody wanted to spend at the end of last year. Volumes were going down and we saw it because we had less work to do," says Henssen, who was a Genpact client for six years, when he was working for General Electric. The Dutchman has an over fourteen-year experience in various executive positions in the American giant from which Genpact separated a few a years ago.
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