International Association of Outsourcing Professionals Honors Procter & Gamble and Cisco for Global Excellence in Outsourcing

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla., Feb. 21 – The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals^® (IAOP^®) today honored employee teams from Procter & Gamble and Cisco with 2012 Global Excellence in Outsourcing (GEO) awards.

P&G’s Global Business Services’ Strategic Alliances team was the winner of the GEO award for Best Practices while Cisco’s Global Finance Operations was recognized in the innovation category for their Entity Support Model. 

Both teams were honored at a luncheon ceremony today attended by hundreds of outsourcing professionals during IAOP’s 2012 annual conference, The Outsourcing World Summit^®.

IAOP started the award program in 2011 to distinguish outsourcing professional teams at customer organizations who have advanced the field’s best practices, created innovative solutions and delivered great results for their companies.

“The GEO award was established to recognize the important impact teams are having on outsourcing,” said IAOP CEO Debi Hamill, in recognizing the winners. “Successful outsourcing initiatives increasingly are the result of teamwork across the entire organization rather than individual efforts.”

“Teams at both of these companies developed solutions that add greater value to outsourcing relationships and reduce risks,” she said. “IAOP applauds our 2012 GEO winners Procter & Gamble and Cisco for these initiatives that are best practice models for the industry.”

P&G Develops New Standards

P&G’s Global Business Services’ Strategic Alliances team was honored for creating a simplified, standardized, systemic approach for each stage in the outsourcing lifecycle, from strategy and sourcing to ongoing governance and renewing or ending relationships.

The team harnessed its accumulated knowledge and experience and combined it with the latest industry best practices to develop the process that is holistic, multi-functional and used across its largest and most critical relationships.

The major initiative aligned on common processes more than 300 governance resources spread about 16 large and complex relationships, and developed and deployed solutions to support them.

As a result, P&G has both improved the efficiency and effectiveness of its outsourcing relationships and reduced the risks associated with the use of third party providers to deliver services. The team also broke new grounds in several areas that lacked standard solutions, including joint business planning, performance visualization and innovation portfolio management.

“The overall result is alliance relationships that are more efficient and effective, and thereby produce greater value, and in our environment where we have many very large relationships that value can be substantial,” the team said in its application.

Cisco Develops Accounting Services Model

Cisco was recognized for creating an innovative Entity Support Model (ESM) that shifts Cisco’s approach to support of accounting, tax and statutory requirements from a country-based, local entity service model to a process-oriented, integrated global entity support model.

The model consists of an Accounting Services team focused on local business support, governance and compliance activities working in partnership with the Global Operations team responsible for operational delivery.

With this change, Cisco centralized accounting processes and is moving toward providing best-in-class front line business engagement and optimized operational delivery.  The model also enables Cisco to enter new markets faster, less expensively and with lower business risk.

“This BPO arrangement is not a labor arbitrage story; this is about risk and value,” the team said in its award-winning application. “It is far more than just taking headcount out of an organization and dropping it into a shared service center. This innovative solution reduces both talent and compliance risk, and offers a platform to build out true end-to-end responsibility related to tax and reporting issues. We now have a model to support our corporate strategy and our emerging market growth.” 

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