A start-up health consulting company employing around 15 people in the UK.
In order to improve efficiency, the company decided to outsource a proportion of
its work to an offshore provider. The consulting firm opted for an offshore sub-contractor
that offered a very limited service.
The founders accepted that prior to any review taking place, they had to devote
their own hard-pressed time to the development of a search strategy and parameters
for the extraction criteria they wanted the offshore provider to use. The firm’s
key concern was that, from the point at which the strategy was handed over to the
provider until the results were delivered, it had little control over the provider’s
methods, pricing or quality procedures.
Although it was felt safe to assume that the offshore supplier would assign tasks
across its local team, and conduct searches and extracts results in accordance with
the format laid out in their agreement, the UK-based consulting company soon realised
that their relationship lacked any real transparency.
The offshore provider did not provide any detail on its operational processes. The
consulting company had no way of gauging progress, nor of knowing how much time
the provider was genuinely spending on any particular aspect of the review process.
The consulting firm was therefore forced to rely on the provider’s self-declared
business integrity and professionalism to ensure quality assurance and accurate
billing.
What Happened Next?
The process turned out to be prolonged, as well as both time and labour intensive.
Over 1000 items of source material had to be analysed.
When finally delivered, the results were in a large and unwieldy Excel table. At
that point, the consulting firm found it had to spend yet more time running final
checks before it could start writing a report for its impatient client.
The bill followed very soon after the spread sheet. The provider charged for a total
of 2,000 hours, based on 6 weeks work by 8 analysts and 2 senior supervisors. How
was the consulting firm supposed to know whether the bill represented accurately
the time spent on its behalf? Should the firm’s founders have taken valuable time
out of their day to negotiate with the provider? And what if the provider had had
no robust systems in place to provide accurate information beyond their initial
‘standard’ estimate?
While the consulting firm was trying to understand exactly where time had been spent
on the project, additional evidence came to light. It was important enough that
it had to be included in the current review. In order to maintain consistency of
approach, the project reverted back to the offshore provider, adding yet more time
and cost to an already large bill.
The SRDB.PRO Alternative
By using SRDB.PRO, the overall delivery time for the full review could have been
reduced by 30%.
Instead of spending time creating a strategy and then handing the project over to
an external provider, the consulting firm would have been able to remain in control
throughout the process. By keeping the review in-house, the consulting firm would
have been able to manage the review in the way it believed most appropriate to ensure
consistency and the highest quality standards.
Handing over a project to an external firm can seem like a cost-effective option,
especially for smaller firms where finances are tight but there’s a lot of work
on the books. But, in addition to reducing the amount of time needed to execute
a project, using SRDB.PRO makes sounds business sense because it eliminates the
expense of using an external consultancy.
Using SRDB.PRO also means, rather than accepting and paying whatever ‘guesstimate’
is billed by an external provider, that a consulting firm can continue to analyse,
allocate and revise the time needed to complete aspects of a review while the process
is underway. Any lessons that are learned, first hand, during one review can also
be put to good use in the planning and implementation of subsequent projects.
The review process would be truly systematic, identifying and taking into account
all available evidence to provide a high quality, comprehensive report without,
in all but the most exceptional cases, any need for subsequent, expensive revisions.