Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/124894
HROA Awards Happy Marriages They're not all alike. A look inside two successful relationships. The Human Resources Outsourcing Association (HROA) announced the winners of their European Customer Relationship awards at the HRO Today Forum EU in Dublin. Top honors went to Randstad Sourceright with Telefónica, and Accenture with the Bank of Ireland and the Learningzone programme. The 2012 theme was "Be Exceptional," and the awards were presented by the HROA's EMEA Board Co-Chairs members, Gary Madden (BP) and Howard Nelson (IBM). The honors are based on rigorous criteria. First, the engagement must have demonstrably helped the buyer overcome at least three significant problems. Second, the deal's contours and measurement must be limned. Third, the relationship needs to have contributed to advancing the practice of HR transformation and/or HRO. Last, either the purchaser or a third party must provide a testimonial. —The Editors Randstad Sourceright and Telefónica Telefónica is the largest employer in Spain, with a broader footprint across much of Europe. Randstad Sourceright undertook due diligence to identify the size, shape, and locations of the company's contingent labour. The due diligence that was undertaken also provided recommendations to establish their European Operating Process to enable them to work out the local variances across each country. Next the provider created strategy and controls for that workforce, and this was followed by the creation of a structure to realize the strategy. Randstad Sourceright provided the account team structure and locations along with the technology platform that would work across the different countries. As for measurement, the provider devised an audit process to identify all contractors that Telefónica were using within the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. This was made a particularly challenging task as there was not always a central point when it came to hiring contractors as line managers would handle vacancies independently. Both sides opted for a one country at a time approach. The overall aim was to reduce spend and headcount for the contractor base, so Randstad Sourceright devised a model that has provided sustainable cost efficiencies. A multi-country outsourced programme across Europe, it all happened through an imitatable partnership to not only deliver the solution but to establish the requirements from the offset. Said Louise Parsons, Telefónica resourcing relationship manager: "Our business is all about finding and harnessing the best possible talent—and that applies as much to our contractor base as it does to our permanent workforce. . . . We worked with [42] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | WINTER 2013 Randstad Sourceright from the beginning to develop a simpler and more cost effective process—at the same time ensuring we have the best talent deployed in the best possible way." Accenture and Bank of Ireland The client in the other winning engagement, Bank of Ireland Group, had initiated a growth strategy in 2005. That required a competitive, lowercost operating model to release capital for further investment. There were a series of organisational changes required to address these needs and a number of strategic enablers—from transformation programme to fundamental redesigns of the organization charts. Accenture helped Bank of Ireland to deliver this transformation and overcome their challenges by forming a partnership under the Learningzone brand, and pursuing an outsourcing model. A key achievement of this partnership was that it built a simple central model that invested in technology, three new training centre's, and restructured its teams to fully support the model and capability of the organisation all within the annual budget of learning, so there was no business case for further investment required. There were a number of initiatives that were delivered through Learningzone to successfully achieve the five key objectives: 1. Enterprise wide and scalable 2. High quality and consistent training 3. Timely and cost effective 4. Providing better Individual control over career development 5. Alignment to business unit objectives The measure of success for all of the initiatives was that it met with at least one of the objectives and also provided flexibility, adaptability, and scalability for the future. As for broader impact, Learningzone believe that a sustainable learning organisation needs to be built on the three above principles and that these principles apply to all industries, not just banking and financial services. The financial crisis proved to Learningzone that if you run your learning service based on these principles you can manage your service to cope with any business requirement or any rightsizing efforts you will inevitably be faced with. Summarising Accenture's contribution was Eamonn Eaton, the bank's head of group learning and engagement (whose deeper dive on the engagement can be seen on 29): "This partnership has brought us capability, expertise, scale, and access to an extensive range of resources through Accenture's proven outsourcing model that we would not have on our own."