Outsourcing has started as a tactical means to gain a functional benefit and evolved into a strategic means of gaining sustainable competitive advantage. As the IT trends are evolving rigorously, companies are forced to rely on multitude of external suppliers for parts, software, know-how, project management and sales to fill the competency gap. In this highly competetive scenario, vendor assessment is really a challenging task; companies have to consider various parameters such as certifications, price, and project delivery metrics while selecting a vendor. Emerged as a trustworthy name in strategic outsourcing field, Akshaya Centre of Excellence(ACE)endeavours to help companies selecting their vendors, and help the vendor to carry out end-to-end responsibilities, while managing all the stakeholders of the project. Nagaraja Gundappa, Chief Consultant at Akshaya Centre of Excellence, says, “Customers have different outsourcing needs and they should be assisted according to the need. Some look for cost effectiveness and we help them to spot low visbility but high-delivery capability vendors whose biling rates can be much less than that of vendors with high brand

visibility. On the other hand, some don’t mind a little extra cost but look for delivery assurance and we help them with project health check services to ensure success of the project”. ACE’s hands on experience in the outsourcing and Project Management domain equips them with deep insights to help spot and assess low - visibility vendors who have high delivery capability but lower cost. The insights also help them to carry out health check of outsourced projects on behalf of customers and spot early signs of projects going off track, and suggest corrective actions to ensure that the projects don’t go off track. These health check services use insights deeper than normal project reviews that can detect if something has already gone wrong but cannot foresee coming problems and provide early warnings.

" Emerged as a trustworthy name in strategic outsourcing field, Akshaya Centre of Excellence(ACE)endeavours to help companies selecting their vendors, and help the vendor to carry out end-to-end responsibilities, while managing all the stakeholders of the project"

Championed by industry veterans including Chief Consultant Nagaraja Gundappa, who has delivered large, complex, agile projects in global organizations like Wipro Technologies, Siemens to global customers such as General Motors, Deloitte & Touche, Sopra Steria and Indian organizations such as Mahindra Comviva, ACE’s flagship offering is the delivery excellence transformation. As the industry is constantly moving up in the chain of value delivery, ACE updates their offerings in line with

the change in value delivery. Delineating on their delivery capability transformation method, Nagaraja further adds, “At the initial stage, we define the target level of value delivery using certain metrics and then map competencies and skills needed to achieve this value delivery.

Once the competencies are defined, our team assesses current competency level of the staff and based on the gap between current level and target level, we come up with a transformation road map that includes class room trainings, self-learning, mentoring /coaching, and data for metrics.”In one major, global organization ACE consultants have been able to achieve more than 10% reduction in project costs using this delivery transformation method.

The consultants from ACE have delivered many results, some impacting entire organizations and some at group level and some at individual level.Consultatns at ACE are always up-to-date and remain at the cutting edge of the trends in the field. As a result, they keep presenting at various industry fora, PMI events being a main platform where they present papers, publish articles and so on.

Steering the company towards Digital Transformation, ACE’s chief consultant Nagaraja Gundappa, envisions a paradigm shift in the firm in coming years. Presently, company is working on to onboard their products and services into a digital platform for project managers to learn, to assess competncies, to assess project health check and use tools to achieve delivery transformation.