Latin America: The Next Sourcing Frontier or an Afterthought?

When our COO Esteban Herrera joined us last year, we definitely got more than we bargained for… try a fluent Spanish and Portuguese speaker with a deep working knowledge  and affinity of the assortment of cultures south of the border.

Yes, there’s more to Esteban than merely a sourcing consultant sporting a painful grin after 14 consecutive hours of negotiations. So who better to examine Latin America, the Gigante Durmiendo of outsourcing. He’s written a great RAPIDInsight on the promise (and realities) of Latin America as a sourcing destinations, so let’s hand you over to Esteban to give you the 411…

Latin America: The Next Sourcing Frontier or an Afterthought?

I’ve been encouraged to see many providers paying more than lip service to Latin America as a region for growth and business opportunity.

Sourcing to LatAm: reaching new heights?

Previously the un-loved stepchild of the outsourcing geographies, Latin America does hold promise for those who approach it the right way—and there is more than one right way to approach it.

I have a personal soft spot for the region, since I got my start in offshoring managing service delivery from Brazil and Mexico before the word “offshoring” came to mean what it does today. I had a great time personally, but still to this day I have yet to find a more creative technical team than the one I led in Brazil, or a harder-working team than the one I was privileged to lead in Mexico. I could tell great stories about the quality of work I managed in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica as well.

But you no longer have to take my word for it.

There are hundreds of multi-nationals and service providers delivering back office support from Latin America. A good friend who runs F&A BPO for a provider recently confessed that they had lost a number of deals because they could not adequately support their global clients’ Latin American needs.

I doubt the region can catch up to the Asian powerhouses in scale, but there are a number of value creating approaches to Latin American outsourcing/near-shoring that are proving successful. You can read about them, as well as the region’s advantages and challenges in our latest RAPIDInsight: Latin America: The Next Sourcing Frontier or an Afterthought?

Read the HfS RAPIDInsight Latin America–The Next Sourcing Frontier or an Afterthought?

Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), IT Outsourcing / IT Services, Sourcing Locations