The Hindu Business Line : Kale bags Nasscom award

Coimbatore March 12 Kale Consultants has bagged the Nasscom IT Innovation Award for creating `a platform-based BPO business model' for the travel and transportation industry.

Explaining the difference between a BPO and a platform-based BPO, Mr Vipul Jain, CEO and Managing Director, Kale Consultants, said that in the former, the customer had the infrastructure and process manual in place. The payment is settled on hourly basis.

"In a platform-based BPO model, we run the customer's revenue accounting system on our "platform" in our premises with the data shared by him. We actually transform from the customers software to run the process on our platform.

The customer does not have to bother about upgrading or maintaining the software. It is processed in our process manual and the account charged per transaction."

"We offer a value proposition to the customer, not cost arbitrage," he continued, and pointed out that the customer would not have to worry about the software or hardware as the revenue accounting would be taken care of by Kale.

"Outsourcing business processes is a proven way of reducing costs and focusing on core business. The success of offshoring is creating even greater momentum. The combination of technology, domain and BPO in innovative ways can deliver huge business value proposition," he told Business Line.

Kale has a software product for revenue accounting. While it continues to sell this product to customers who prefer to run the process themselves, it also offers to do the revenue accounting for those who wish to have it outsourced.

For all industry segments

Answering a query, he said platform-based BPO model would be applicable to all industry segments, but the solution, not so easy for it strives to converge business processes and unparalleled domain knowledge to deliver transformational value proposition (the ability to bring IT, BPO and domain knowledge together).

Kale began this initiative with one customer and one million transactions in 2001. The company has so far processed 50 million transactions for four customers as part of the complete revenue accounting business model.

According to Mr Jain, Kale's audit services helped airlines recover $10.44 million. While admitting that there was enormous opportunity for growth in the travel solutions space, he said, "There is a lot of pressure on margins. The industry is growing, but the yields are dropping."

Asked how Kale coped with this situation, he said, "Our value proposition is not just about cost. We offer solutions to airlines, transport, cargo carriers, travel and logistics companies."

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