Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the United States, finalised a 10-year contract with Indian outsourcing vendor Genpact to handle their accounting processes.

Pramod Bhasin, CEO of Genpact, said, “We are delighted to announce this strategic relationship with Walgreens. This agreement strengthens our ability to deliver end-to-end solutions for the retail and healthcare industries. As leaders in our industry, we are redefining the market by moving beyond just process efficiencies and focusing more on accelerating positive business outcomes for our clients. We believe our domain expertise in finance and accounting, health care, back-office processes, re-engineering and analytics coupled with our heritage of Lean Six Sigma uniquely positions us to support Walgreens growth initiatives”.

“We are definitely seeing a comeback with lot many deals in the pipeline of large value. This is also a large contract considering the number of people involved. We will also keep many jobs onshore and still be able to maintain margins.” He added.

According to the contract, Genpact will acquire Walgreens’ Danville facility in Illinois and manage employment. Approximately 500 accounting employees will be transferred to Genpact payroll in the following months.

Walgreens executive vice president and CFO Wade Miquelon said, “Genpact’s proven ability to bring efficiency to finance and accounting processes and its commitment to our Danville employees were key factors in our decision to forge this agreement. The deal will help us improve cost productivity and facilitate our growth strategy, while maintaining an agile and service-focused organisation.”

The partnership between Walgreens and Genpact will affect accounting employees at Walgreens offices in Deerfield, Danville, and nine smaller accounting sites in the United States.

Malaysia Airlines has selected Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest software vendor, for their IT outsourcing program. The airline aims to improve internal customer experience by transforming its IT operations.

Faridal Abdul Rahman, Chief Information Officer of Malaysia Airlines said, “This is in line, with BTP2 to align the role of IT to the airlines P&L. One of the key initiatives includes fine-tuning our IT outsourcing strategy to deliver the required business results at a lower cost. At the same time, we will continue to work with our key vendors to maximise service delivery and to proactively address other business requirements.”

Tata Consultancy Services APAC head Vish Iyer said, “We are delighted to partner with Malaysia Airlines and will leverage our expertise and best practices to help them achieve their strategic business transformation objectives, enabling them to capture the growth in the global aviation market.”

The contract requires TCS to take charge of IT infrastructure management of the airline’s data centres, IT networks, and IT security. TCS will also set up an ITIL V3 compliant service management organisation under a unique build, operate and transfer methodology for Malaysia Airlines.

Tiger Airways Singapore has taken its first step towards improving its call centre and customer services by partnering with Symphony BPO Solutions.

The plan launched on 15 April 2010, but the improvements to customer service experience will be implemented phase by phase. At this time, agents are being recruited and trained, and this process is expected to take a few months. Once this process is complete, there will be twice the number of agents to handle customer calls. Not only is the number of agents increased, but operation hours are also extended.  Tiger Airways and Symphony BPO Solutions also added local hotlines handled by bilingual agents (English and the local language) for customers calling from Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Tiger Airways Singapore Managing Director, Rosalynn Tay, said, “We are pleased to partner with Symphony BPO Solutions as they have established efficiencies and a strong track record in providing call centre services. Once the transition has been completed and the new call centre improvements are in place, we look forward to improving our customers’ experience, particularly in terms of call waiting time.”

Symphony BPO Solutions is part of The Symphony Group, a business process outsourcing company located in Asia. Symphony provides BPO solutions to over 3,000 clients from more than 29 countries.

International Paper Company, a global paper and packaging company, has renewed its contract with Hewitt Associates, a company that provides HR BPO worldwide.

The contract stated that Hewitt Associates will continue to handle HR business processes such as health and welfare administration, payroll, recruiting support activities, workforce administration, and application support and help desk services via the SAP(R) platform. Hewitt will also begin providing call centre support, flex staffing management services, learning administration, and HR manager support activities.

Paul Karre, International Paper’s HR and Communications senior VP said, “Hewitt has been our trusted HR partner for nearly a decade. As an early adopter of HR BPO, we have worked through a variety of challenges over the years and have always come out with a better solution. Hewitt’s support integrating our acquisition of Weyerhauser’s Containerboard, Packaging and Recycling (CBPR) assets and their 15,000 employees demonstrated the strength of our partnership and our ability to execute together. We continue to be extremely pleased with the benefits we get from working with Hewitt. The true value is that they come to us with new ideas, new solutions and innovative approaches. It’s only natural to extend our relationship.”

Hewitt Associates’ HR BPO president Jim Konieczny had this to say about their renewed partnership: “We’re honoured to continue serving International Paper and its employees. Our long-standing partnership has enabled both Hewitt and International Paper to learn from one another and grow together to better serve International Paper’s employees. We are very happy with the innovative and sustainable results we have produced together as pioneers in the HR BPO industry, and we look forward to seeing the groundbreaking BPO solutions this relationship produces in the future.”

BT has contracted outsourcing supplier UnitedLex for their basic legal processes and closed its in-house legal support services office in India.

15 UnitedLex professionals, including lawyers,  admin and online support staff, and project managers begin handling commercial contracting and antitrust regulation employment for BT’s UK, USA, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore branches on April 1^st in Gurgaon, India.

“Our existing Gurgaon-based in-house team delivering legal support services has performed extremely well, but the time is right for us to transition the work and our people to an established legal process outsourcer, which can offer industry best practices and provide global scalability,” said David Eveleigh, general counsel for BT Global Services.

“Delivering measurable quality and strategic legal technology are the two critical objectives and form our key business mandates. Accordingly, we have designed a robust quality control and quality assurance process to ensure consistently high, measurable quality for our work product,” added Dan Reed, UnitedLex CEO.

The news from BT follows their announcement of substituting Anne Fletcher with former Cable & Wireless legal chief Daniel Fitz as their new group general counsel.

Facebook, the multi-billion dollar leading social networking site to date, launches its first Asian operations office in India, to better facilitate its continuous increase in users. There are over 400 million Facebook users and 100 million Facebook Mobile users and these figures are growing fast.

According to Facebook, the operations office is located in Hyderabad, and will have teams in charge of advertising and developer support. The office will work in conjunction with their other offices in Palo Alto, California; Austin, Texas; and Dublin, Ireland.

Situating their latest centre in India, and following the sun, Facebook aims to establish support centres in different time zones, with 24-hour support and available in different languages.

Don Faul, global online operations director says, “We expect our new office in Hyderabad to tap into the region’s strong pool of talented people who understand operations and technology, and help us more effectively serve the needs of our users, advertisers and developers around the world.”

Since its inception in 2004, the number of Facebook users has rapidly and steadily climbed to over 400 million worldwide. It already has an estimated 8 million users in India.

Technology giant Microsoft has increased the amount of legal work that they outsource, having now signed an agreement with CPA Global, a legal outsourcing provider in India.

Word about the deal spread after Microsoft slashed its legal budget by 15% resulting in a significant decrease in in-house legal department employees. Prior to the budget cut, Microsoft’s legal department had 1,050 staff and a $900 M annual budget.

Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft, Marty Shively, who is now based in India, has been keeping an eye on their company’s outsourcing opportunities.  He says, “We have been outsourcing legal work in the area of patent and trademark to CPA Global and Wipro. We already have a 5-year relationship with CPA Global and hope to strengthen it in the future.”

The majority of the legal work that Microsoft is outsourcing is associated with patent and trademark, docketing and complex portfolio analysis. From time to time, 100 percent of the work has been outsourced and occasionally Microsoft only outsourced sections that can be quickly completed in India.