Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/136276
APAC Forum Tough Customer Open and honest outsourcing advice from an experienced buyer. By Seng Fong Ow In my last job, when we were preparing for the migration to a different release of the HRIS platform, we were faced with a stark choice: Should we continue to outsource payroll, or should we take back the payroll function to ensure more control on our end? After all, we were not entirely happy with the existing payroll vendor, and at that time, we did not have a variety of vendors to choose from due to some top-down decisions. Interestingly, the first instinctive thing we did was to ask the existing vendor whether they could continue to be our payroll vendor using a different HRIS platform. I could only think of three reasons for this paradoxical behaviour: • We acknowledged certain HR functions are best left to the experts. Such functions are no longer our core competencies, and we have no confidence that we could do the job better than our outsourced vendors. • Despite all the noises we made about our vendors and their abilities to honour the service level agreements, we may have to admit reluctantly that they were meeting if not exceeding performance expectations in what they are tasked to deliver. It is just human nature to complain. • In this particular instance, we were operating under strenuous security and regulatory requirements in the public sector, and there were few alternatives in the market that could meet the enterprise governance requirement. [16] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | SPRING 2013 I started to recall my various experiences with all the outsourced vendors I've worked with in both the private and public sectors. I used to work in a United States-based multinational where outsourcing of HR services was so extensively deployed that I needed to hone my skills as an HR generalist, pulling different levers to deal with the myriad of outsourced partners: Infosys for HR shared services; Adecco for recruitment of contingent workers; Cartus for international assignments; General Physics for training programmes; HireRight for reference checks; Lee Hecht Harrison for career transition; and ADP for payroll services. It was somewhat frustrating, as I often had to fend off questions from our line divisions why certain things did not work out the way they promised to be. I felt aggrieved because the global centres of expertise (COEs) at corporate HR negotiated some worldwide deals that might not bode well for our geographical area. I was stressed, as I had to intervene quite frequently as the business HR partner on the HR outsourced vendors who could not answer some of the deeper order questions. In a multinational environment, it is not uncommon that the departments that you support naturally default to you on any struggles they have with HR products and services. I remembered we affectionately coined it the "boomerang effect" within the business HR community— the question raised by the employee would eventually come back to haunt us.