Offshoring Creative Services - Strategies for setting up robust offshore operations

The Creative Services offshoring outsourcing in India does not enjoy the kind of distinction as do the other traditional segments of the BPO/KPO industry. As such, it is invariably slotted into the BPO segment, and is subject to cookie-cutter methodology borrowed from the BPO best practices which might lead to frustrating results. This article makes a case for an approach which is pertinent to creative services operations, while admitting the importance of best-practice adoption from elsewhere.

For companies seeking to offshore and outsource creative services, the opportunity to save up to 40-60% of their process costs constitutes the number one reason to offshore. However, these companies are looking for more than just the cost arbitrage in most cases. They seek trust worthy partners who would deliver high quality jobs within their budgets and with good turnaround (even better with time zone differences). In the case of captives, achieving this might seem deceptively easy, but has its share of pitfalls if transitions are not done diligently. For third parties it is not only a case of appearing professional while pitching for the business, but also a case of walking the talk when they do get the business.

Creative services include a wide variety of offerings. The services could cover a gamut of design and production processing workflows related to advertising, corporate design cells, direct marketing agencies, marcom service providers, publishers of books, magazines, catalogues, digitisation workflows, illustration, visual identity, GUI and rich media development, e-learning, the ever ubiquitous PowerPoint and proposals support and several more. Each segment has its own rules to play with and quirks to contend with. Given that, however, there are still some common areas especially from the perspective of setting up an offshore operation that merit close attention.

Although the following insights are targeted towards the third party service managers and transition managers, however, leaders and managers from the captives can also derive some pointers on how to effectively set up and run offshoring creative services shops:

1. Volume forecasts or demand guarantee – This is more relevant when you are working on a committed headcount basis. Always insist on a stated volumes forecast or a minimum threshold of work that the client would be sending. Ideally it should be covered in the contractual documents for the off-shoring project. The forecasts give you a minimum target to work in terms of setting up the team and the infra, while providing you with safety net in the form of the guaranteed payment against a minimum level of utilization of the offshore team.
2. Up-to-date infrastructure – always start with an assessment of the existing technology being used or to be acquired. Creative services rely heavily on technological aspects like software, networks, servers and work flow systems. Cutting corners on this aspect will mean that the workforce will have to make do with blunt tools. Think ahead and plan for the scalability of the infrastructure you are going to acquire. One should be prepared for both ramps-up and ramp-down scenarios (in case initial pilots are not successful). Look for leasing of infra rather than buying if you are not sure of the ROI cycle.
   Use open source software as much as possible as it does not cost you anything, there is no financial implications for you if the software gets upgraded and you can customize it if the team has talent.
3. Iron clad SLA and business rules – Insist on as much granularity upfront as possible while creating, negotiating or agreeing to a set of Service Level Agreements. The SLA should be able to spell out clearly the acceptable norms related to the timeliness, quality and quantity of output that you would be committed to provide as a service provider. The SLA should also detail the governance model, that is, things like who does what, when and how; what are the remedies available to either parties in terms of exception and escalation handling and what are the penalties if SLAs are not met as a whole or in parts, what is the frequency of meetings, who should attend etc. Ideally the SLA should be drafted within the first three months of the pilot or transition phase to remove any ambiguity at a later stage. A very important understanding that your SLA should give you is that, when and how are you going to measure the success of the operation?
4. Hire cross-skilled talent – This strategy will give your operation unsurpassed agility when the client asks for additional services than the ones initially explored or agreed to. This also gives you a sort of a plan ‘B’ in case you face a possibility of redeploying your staff on other projects in case of a ramp-down. Look for people talented in more than two creative services competencies/skills. Multitasking skills of the employees, especially in the supervisory and middle to senior management layer could be very useful in case you use an account management approach to run the operations and manage client relationships as they are better qualified to offer solutions to the clients in an integrated manner and sometimes can cross-sell the team’s capability. Moreover, cross-skilled teams are better utilised as they do not face the bottlenecks in the form of work flowing only in their relevant area of expertise.
5. Strong Quality Assurance and Management Information – Although creative services processes involve a lot of human intervention and judgement based decision making, sometimes it is not that apparent that getting strong and meaningful MI data is very much possible within creative services. Admittedly the ways and means of arriving at data related to quality will be mostly based on ratings and other such judgmental methods, enough meaningful MI can be generated. On the other hand there might be efforts to impose things like Six Sigma and standardisation of processes, but experience has shown us that beyond a certain point such endeavours are a waste of time and effort. Quality assurance should be done by specialist roles alone. Maker-checker model should be followed. Another useful tool which can be used to eliminate waste from the processes is Lean which can yield surprising results.
6. Innovate – Make use of the key technology enablers available today to ensure productivity gains, more accuracy in the output and reducing the time to market for your clients. The PDF technology which has made digital work flows free from the clutches of legacy proprietary and disjointed processes is today an industry standard which works seamlessly between different kinds of printing technology. Another technology which has brought about the syncretism amongst the various mediums is XML which allows the workflows to seamlessly traverse the boundaries of print, the Internet or TV and to deliver design and content in a consistent and efficient way. Significant gains can be obtained by adopting digital/PDF workflows, Soft proofing, digital asset management, internetworking and use of XML

Conclusion

Creative services offshoring in India has come a long way during the past 5-6 years. From the initial ‘grunt’ work kind of portfolio to service offerings which cover ideation, content, gaming and high end compositing and 3D graphics the industry has matured significantly. However, the mainstay of the whole set up have been publishing and PowerPoint and proposal support As such the whole industry seems to be sitting on a cusp of typical backend operations category and little bit of the KPO/middle office kind of operations. Maybe it deserves a separate niche of its own, so that it gets insights and ideas which are unique to it alone and therefore we see a real blossoming of the industry in the time to come.

The knowledge is there, some acquired by getting exposed to ground realities of setting up and running such operations, while some acquired by adopting best practices from other areas. Hopefully these insights come in handy in setting up a more client centric lean and mean kind of offshoring operations in the creative services