The Hindu Business Line : Small players change the rules of consulting

BUSINESS consulting may never be the same again, as small players take on the giants. Not only by competing for the same projects, but also by changing the rules of the game.

And this is how they do it. While one introduces consulting as a Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) product, the other player links bulk of the fee with desired success. Both players have one thing in common - belief in a hands-on approach and lower ``more realistic'' price points.

Exlservice, which runs four BPO facilities for the US/UK markets and focuses on the annuity stream of business, is now ready to start business consulting. It is perhaps the first BPO to provide such a product.

``By providing business consulting, we will differentiate ourselves from competition and compete with global players on a project-to-project basis. We will focus on the four areas of business - risk consulting, process consulting and process re-engineering, process mapping and documentation and lastly, opportunity identification analysis services. The last one would especially help clients identify the processes they should outsource and provide an outshoring roadmap," said Mr Rohit Kapoor, President & CFO, Exlservice Inc.

Mr Kapoor said clients would prefer Exl's consulting services due to its knowledge base and lower cost structure. For Exl plans to have consulting business feed in its BPO line and add this service to the portfolio of existing BPO clients.

In fact, Exl expects to make consulting 20 per cent of its overall business, though Mr Kapoor acknowledged that this was a volatile business, while BPO services (the company's core business) were much more stable.

So while Exl leverages its expertise for the purpose of consulting, a couple of young consultants have rewritten consulting rules to ``make a difference'' in the profession.

They have launched their own company, Positron Advisory Services Pvt Ltd, to consult in the field of performance improvement, merger integration and business incubation. Positron's business model links key revenue to results.

But these youngsters prefer to call themselves ``catalysts'', not consultants. They explain that their business model was the anti-thesis of the traditional model.

``Traditional consulting involves large team of consultants working for long periods to design technically competent reports which invariably do not get implemented. This is because the traditional model relies on the `big bang' approach and a mindset that knowledge is the key to success. While the reports outline for the client a new strategy or better processes, they usually result in change processes that are too complex for most organisations to carry out successfully. The end result - clients end up spending large sums of money with no assurance of business benefits since in most cases it is they who are responsible for implementation of the consultant's recommendations.''

"The idea is to unfreeze learning. In our years spent working with global players, the deliverable was always just a report, no implementation. We are working the other way round - we avoid reports and instead work closely with the company on a project to ensure that the desired result is delivered and at much lower costs,'' said Mr Anurag Mehra and Mr Abhijeet Virmani, who are both engineers and MBAs from top institutions and have worked with Arthur Andersen and KPMG.

Positron, in fact, is keen on working with smaller companies.

``It is in the Rs 200-crore to Rs 300-crore company that the real management challenges lie and these are not being addressed. Every time we approach a client with our model, we meet success. However, we ensure that we select clients with a sense of urgency in wanting to change and grow,'' they said, as they look out for ``companies that have ambition and a fire in the belly'', just as the Positron team has.