After three years of hard labor, we, at HfS, are proud to launch our first “HfS Blueprint” that we believe is the revolutionary crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers.
The industry has been literally screaming at us to change the way analyst firms portray their assessments of service provider performance, and we’ve dug deep to leverage our massive community, our extensive buyer relationships and demand data, to facilitate what we truly believe is a major game-changer in the research analyst industry: The HfS Blueprint.
Finally: A genuine way to assess services providers that isn’t reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst;
Finally: A credible methodology to gauge the performance of service providers against “real” innovation and execution capabilities;
Finally: A performance assessment of providers that apportions importance weightings of each innovation and execution category based on data from our State of Outsourcing survey, conducted with the support of KPMG, covering 1355 enterprise buyers, influencers, advisors and provider executives;
Finally: A performance assessment of providers where exhaustive inputs from buyers and influencers shape the scoring (not solely a handful of rose-tinted client references from the providers themselves);
Finally: A customizable assessment tool where enterprise buyers can re-calibrate the weightings to assess their provider-fit based on their own unique needs.
Yes indeed – we threatened these Blueprints five months ago, and we’re now ready to launch the first one… in the much vaunted, but still immature, market of Finance and Accounting BPO, which is currently growing at a double-digit clip. Click here to access our first Blueprint in Finance & Accounting BPO:
Click to Enlarge
We are happy to discuss the Blueprint methodology in greater detail (drop us a note here) but essentially, in this example for F&A BPO, we assessed data from 745 live multi-process F&A BPO engagements to ascertain provider market shares, depth of client base, breath of execution and geographic scope of delivery. We then conducted exhaustive interviews with multiple buyers and market advisors to help score providers against each other across all the sub-categories of the Blueprint using ExpertChoice, an advanced statistical analytics platform. We also received a tremendous amount of cooperation from (almost) all of the providers above, as we went through this exhaustive process to understand their concrete plans for the future, get really deep with their current client relationships, their overall vision and their appetite to evolve into higher-value areas of F&A BPO.
Congratulations to the Winners Circle and the chasing pack of High Performers… we’ll see how the picture has shifted in 2014!
Thanks to all who took part – you’ve helped create a little bit if research history.
You can download the full HfS Blueprint methodology by clicking here.
Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Finance and Accounting, HfS Blueprint Results, HfSResearch.com Homepage, Sourcing Best Practises
Kudos to HFS for this bold and innovative move. This is an area of the research industry that desperately needs a change in its approach,
Larry
Excellent work – this should “send the cat among the pigeons”!
James Levy
Another cause to celebrate the efforts and success of HfS. I am excited to see the Blueprint help change the behavior of providers and how they use analysts to promote themselves.
G.
I applaud this attempt to inject some realism into the analyst industry. Being able to cultivate the views and opinions of the broader industry, and not simply the bias of a solitary analyst, is a real game-changer.
I wish you guys the very best of fortune with the Blueprint initiative,
Sam
Phil and team,
This looks really ground-breaking – I am very impressed. Can you elaborate on how the execution and innovation scores breakdown?
Eric
[…] friends at Horses for Sources are introducing their Blueprint which they position as “not reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst” as […]
@Eric – The methodology is in the download. Each factor is broken down into weights, and those weights are part of the published Blueprint (available to clients). The weights change from category to category based on the inputs from the buyer community. The weights and scores are customizable for clients, so they can run their own model based on their specific needs – or compare how their results compare to the broader community perspective.
Thanks for sharing this blog. This is looks really ground-breaking . I’m very impressed.
This is great move. Can’t wait to look at the first report. All the best !
@Eric – to add to Tony’s points here, the Blueprint shifts the “power” away from the analyst or analyst firm and onto the broader community, where the buyers, influencers and providers assess what criteria are more important for said category (in this case F&A BPO) and the providers are paired off against each other within each category, based on evidence from exhaustive customer interviews, expert interactions and finally the provider’s own vision and investments.
PF
Kudos to HFS. You are a breath of fresh air blowing through a stale, stagnating analyst business. I wish you the very best as you take on these antiquated models,
Andrew
I love the fact that you are crowdsourcing the evaluations and steering clear of these dubious methodologies I am so tired of seeing. The sourcing world needs this!
Jim McNamara
Really looking forward to finding out more and seeing how this evolves.
This is very interesting. Can you clarify what constitutes Innovation and Execution? These are very broad terms,
Gerry
@Gerry: these are the high-level subcategories we use:
EXECUTION:
Quality of Customer Relationships:
Quality of Account Management Teams
Engaging Customers and Developing Customer Communities
Incorporate Customer Feedback
Real World Delivery of Solutions:
Actual Delivery of Services for each Sub process (O2C, P2P, R2R, other)
Geographic Footprint and scale
Usefulness of Services of Specific Client Needs
Flexibility to Deliver Both End to End and Point Solutions
Experience Delivering Industry Specific Solutions
Market Share
Flexibility Pricing Models to Meet Customer Needs
INNOVATION:
Vision for End to End Process:
Concrete Plans to Deliver Value beyond Cost
Integration of Tech into Business Process
Continuous Improvement Methodology and Capability
Vision for Industry Specific Solutions
Ability to Leverage External Value Drivers
Drop me a mail if you’d like to learn more:
phil dot fersht @hfsresearch.com
PF
[…] what’s next for Genpact? You’ve made the Winners Circle now – you are one of the big, glitzy, top-tier providers in this space. Are you ready to […]
this is amaazing work phil.. hats off to the team.. Pls explain how execution and innovation are measured..
This looks impressive and highly insightful…look forward to seeing such analysis for this industry.
[…] Can you believe the HfS Blueprints have been circulating the industry for over a year now since we announced ourselves so modestly last March ? […]
[…] Can you believe the HfS Blueprints have been circulating the industry for over a year now since we announced ourselves so modestly last March ? […]
[…] the market. One of those has been Capgemini, which has captured third spot in market share and made the Winner’s Circle for finance and accounting (F&A) […]
[…] into our HfS Blueprints over the last couple of years, when we proudly launched our revolutionary HfS Blueprint crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers. Yes indeed folks – Gartner has announced […]
[…] our HfS Blueprints over the last couple of years, when we proudly launched our revolutionary HfS Blueprint crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers. Yes indeed folks – Gartner has announced it […]