"Infosys challenged our processes to make them more efficient"

Testimonial

Vishal Seth
Country Head, Alcoa India GBS

Infosys, four-and-a-half to five years ago, was in a state of infancy in business process outsourcing and of course Alcoa had never explored that space before. We thought it would be a great journey to take together, and I have to say that we have realized the savings that we expected to realize. When we first started thinking of outsourcing, as it is typically done, we evaluated several players out there and we found that with Infosys, our values are aligned very closely as a company. And also, Infosys was very flexible and excited about joining Alcoa in the journey.

Infosys' capability is their ability to seamlessly transition new processes. I think, Infosys has a very solid knowledge transfer, knowledge management and documentation process which helps us pick processes from Alcoa and move them to Infosys very seamlessly, so that once they are transitioned they are sustainable and well-performing going forward.

We are always very happy with the team at Infosys; we consider it to be, for all practical purposes, as Alcoa's. We don't see them as Infosys' employees, the only difference I would say is that their pay check comes from Infosys. They could have very well be Alcoans, we really consider them as extensions of our Alcoa teams. I think, the next step is really going to be of transformation and a paradigm shift, which will require us to relook the way we do business today and think about some transformation-enabling processes that will help reap more benefits.

 

Patrick Arnegger
Director, Global Financial Services

We decided back in 2004 to sign a contract with Infosys mainly in the Finance and Accounting (F&A) space and then we added on. We went through a transition initially; I think it was 12 people upfront. Then the engagement grew through different processes in the F&A space and as well as in Knowledge Services (KS). This is part of our global business services strategy within Alcoa - we operate in shared services for many years with a company. Today, our model is definitely a combination of outsourcing and relationship with Infosys in the BPO space, with other vendors for different types of activities and in-sourcing activities basically operating shared services within the company.

We believe it's true that you have realized value to Alcoa by providing a strong performance across competitive elements. We also believe that you brought process improvement by generating new ideas. This one is still an enigma to us - how Infosys and the team can continuously generate ideas, develop new opportunities, and actually challenge the processes to constantly make them more efficient. Alcoa wants to be the best company and the challenges that we face are basically in constantly providing the best services to our business units for them to become competitive to the outside market and actually offer the best products at the best price. We believe that the partnership with Infosys is actually supporting it. Today, we have reached a level of excellence and sustainable performance that is actually putting our GBS organization in a great shape to provide different types of services to our business units in a timely, accurate and cost-effective manner, which ultimately will translate to a profitable business and good relationship with our customers.

We appreciate the support from all levels at Infosys. We just renewed the contract for another period of time and we are very excited about that.