Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/210252
10th Anniversary Special From Chaos to Clarity The European HRO market has grown to deliver on its promises—and much more. By Stephen V. Taylor In the beginning, there was chaos. ``The market was overwhelmed with buyer demand and providers were challenged to digest and support newly awarded contracts," says Jill Goldstein, talent and HR BPO offering lead for Accenture. ``We were all, the providers, running around like chickens with our heads cut off.'' That atmosphere was spurred by a sudden surge in client demand for global transformational business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts. And the market was racing to keep up, she says. Accenture had itself inked in 2006 a sevenyear HRO deal with London- and Rotterdam-based Unilever, the world's second-largest consumer-goods maker. [38] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | AUTUMN 2013 ``In the mid-2000s we really started to see the energy and excitement around HR BPO with a marked increase in buyer demand," Goldstein says. ``Providers were focused on industrialised global delivery with standardised platforms, and clients on large transformational contracts that were going to deliver the biggest cost savings.'' Indeed, opportunities abound. Perhaps they were too abundant for a market experiencing its first round of growing pains. The provider side was struggling to meet the expectations of some of those early so-called lift-and-shift contracts, in which instead of fixing business problems, clients were outsourcing them.