BANGALORE, INDIA: Regulatory bodies in India are rigid in their rules and regulations, firms here are more conservative and there are more checkpoints in place. Enterprises are less leveraged and hence, safer, says Joydeep Mukherjee, Head KPO, and Infosys BPO.

He notes: "Having said this, what does it do to service providers like us is we believe that there is a lot we can provide in the present situation to these firms. But given that we are largely targeted as an export commodity in this time of point, we continue to focus on the market outside India. The productivity that we are going to get will be much lesser in Indian firms when compared to the US and European markets because of the cost arbitrage,"

"Secondly, lot of Indian firms do not have this mindset and are actually not ready to get that insight and input from another consulting or service organization like us," he adds.

However, on the technology side things are moving and customers are outsourcing a lot of technology. BPO has happened in pockets, but I don't see any of the enterprises doing large-scale outsourcing. Only some banks and telecom companies have done it. But it will happen sooner or later, feels Mukherjee.

Contract management gaining increasing legal attention
Some studies have shown that about 85 percent of the firms do not have automated contract management processes in place. In today's context they need to assess and look at all the risks that they are facing at the counter party group level, says Rahul Shah, AVP, Head – COE, Knowledge Services, Infosys BPO.

"Companies need a snapshot of all the contracts in one global repository, which is not there. Secondly, they need to cut costs and increase efficiency and productivity. Studies have shown that from a contract compliance perspective there is a 55 percent improvement. In the contract compliance, if you have an automated compliance process there is about 25 to 30 percent reduction in the administrative costs. Hence there is an imperative need in going for automated contract management process. Also, the overall turn around time gets impacted by 25-30 percent," he explains.

The automated process has lot of benefits when compared to the manual process, which is time consuming. It helps in maintaining transparency as the process is driven by workflows, where we get to know how many times has the contract has come for expiry, and it also prompts the mangers to look at contracts which are about to expire.

Litigation services
"The latest in vogue in this current market situation is the litigation services which helps lot of firms who are in litigation. If there are litigations with more companies, a large amount of data has to be compiled for legal relevance. Given this, there is going to be a lot of review happening and this will continue for next couple of years," says Mukherjee.

"Litigation services are not much heard of because the entire process of litigation needs to be largely localized. In the current meltdown situation there are defaults of various kinds, people will sue each other and there will be more litigations that we see."