Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/210252
10th Anniversary Special understanding of what they had taken on,'' he says. ``It was really a genuine lift and shift of people and assets. The degree of understanding of what it took to sustain the operation was not there. I would say on the P&G side, we needed to invest more time and effort than we had recognised from the outset.'' Even as the industry was in a rudimentary state, a lot of deals were being made. ``The good news is that many providers were very successful in that (2004-2006) period and we all won our share of large contracts and clients were very excited about moving forward with HR BPO,'' Accenture's Goldstein says. ``The challenge for providers was that they had more business than they could physically digest within their organisation.'' At Hewitt Associates at the time, it became painfully clear that they were a bit in over their heads in this flood of outsourcing contract opportunities. ``Those were dark days when we overcommitted and nearly ran outsourcing in the ground,'' explains Will Durston, managing director for the BPO business in EMEA for what is now Aon Hewitt after Aon's acquisition of Hewitt Associates. ``We went through a very difficult period. There were not enough resources to implement deals we had sold.'' For Anne Mortensen, director of EMEA HR and learning delivery for IBM Corp., which in 2003 signed a 10-year HRO contract with Procter & Gamble Co., that time for the company was also about positioning itself as a top provider of HRO services in the European market, which was still on an uphill slope even as it sought to gain traction. ``It was early days and it was quickly about identifying who gets invited, who gets invited to present, and who doesn't,'' she says. ``I think it was more that we couldn't quite describe the temperature. Is it cold or is it hot, is it day or is it night? Because you didn't know what signs to look for.'' On the client side, it wasn't a much brighter picture. ``There were unrealistic expectations on both sides'' in the early part of the decade, recalls Richard King, Procter & Gamble's director of HR resources in western Europe and employee benefits worldwide. ``Our partners didn't have a sophisticated enough ``We sold a lot of deals but we also oversold and overcommitted,'' Durston says. ``We didn't have enough resources to implement deals we had sold. We had some challenges in implementing them. You don't just implement in a week, but in months, and often it takes a year or 18 months. We had an awful lot of work on our plate at that moment.'' By the mid-2000s, it was obvious to both clients and vendors that a sea-change in how HRO/BPO contracts were constructed was required if needs were going to be met on both sides in perhaps the industry's first major shakeup. ``In the 2007-2008 time frame, most providers took a step back and said `let's make sure we can be successful with these deals. Let's be sure we are building the right infrastructure to service these clients and grow in the longer term,''' says Accenture's Goldstein. For Hewitt Associates, a rethink of its HR BPO model was primordial if it was going to remain in the outsourcing market, Durston says. ``We just stopped the sales pipeline,'' he explains. ``We then straightened our business out and we learned an awful lot and it was painful. It was a period of not making a lot of money.'' By 2008, the company was back in the market, albeit with a much tighter model and criteria for bringing on new business. AUTUMN 2013 | www.hroglobal.com [39]