Ed Cross: When I was at Pricewaterhouse, I was heavily involved in the area of procurement project consultancy. Exchanges were much heralded and I was very supportive of them but the more I got into them, I observed that they didn’t take off. A lot of them lost ground, went bankrupt, or disappeared. There’s an
Sramana Mitra: There are some very special exchange offerings in the automotive industry and several other spaces. There are very successful vertical exchanges operating right now doing billions of dollars in transactions. Ed Cross: Probably from the European end, but I see very little activity. It may well be the case that they’re successful in
Sramana Mitra: I have followed those phases. There is Starbucks doing contract life-cycle management. Then, we have had pretty sizable companies being built in the procurement management systems base like E-vines that now sits inside SAP and several other vertical-focused offerings on procurement exchanges. How do you see that trend evolving? Ed Cross: I wouldn’t want to specifically
Sramana Mitra: It’s stuff like office supplies that you are outsourcing. It’s more of a cost consideration. Whereas, a more strategic procurement issue would be dealing with parts and technology, and that’s where it becomes more complicated. Ed Cross: Let me be more direct. To outsource indirect stationery, for example, can be a fairly simple
Sramana Mitra: What do you think is driving that trend? Why is procurement outsourcing growing? Ed Cross: A couple of things. One is that businesses need to save money. Though the global economy is starting to come out of recession, there was a level of retrenching that went on when economic conditions were difficult for
Sramana Mitra: You said you have about 4,000 people in India. What’s the global distribution of the workforce? Ed Cross: We have about 8,500 people around the world, of which about 4,000-4,500 are in India. About 2,000 are in the U.K., about 1,000 in Europe, several hundreds in North America, about 500 in Australia, and the
Having been awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year by The Economic Times back in 2010, Xchanging continues to provide leading solutions to a wide range of industries across the globe. Ed Cross, Xchanging’s Executive Director, takes us on a quick tour of the business outsourcing landscape discussing the trends, challenges, and opportunities facing the industry.