HRO Carrying On Despite Slow, Decelerating Economy

Amy L. Gurchensky, HRO Research Analyst, NelsonHall

For those of you who are not aware, NelsonHall assesses the confidence in the HRO market on a quarterly basis. The report involves surveying HRO suppliers from all disciplines to get a pulse on the market.

 From time to time, my colleagues and I will blog about these results. I thought I would take a step back and re-examine HRO supplier confidence levels since the report began.

 As the name suggests, the supplier confidence level measures how confident HRO suppliers are in the future market with a level of 100 representing no change in confidence.

Since the report began, the index has constantly shown a healthy level, despite some fluctuations in between. The following chart graphs HRO service provider confidence levels since its inception.

HRO Supplier Confidence Chart

2011 shows a major turning point in HRO vendor optimism, revealing a downward trend line that coincides with the Employment Situation report produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There is no need to panic though. It appears that supplier expectations are now more accurately aligned to pipeline activity, which showed a slight weakening in Q1 2012. Again, the most important thing to remember is that the indices are still at a healthy level.

Despite the headwinds from the economic recovery, business for HRO has carried on as evidenced in the following contract activity:

• ADP: awarded a multi-country payroll contract by HP covering ~130,000 employees in 40 countries across Asia Pacific (excluding India), Europe, and the Americas (excluding the U.S.)
• Fidelity: awarded a DC administration contract by the University of Washington for ~31,000 employees; it is now the sole recordkeeping provider for the university
• Talent2: awarded a three year RPO contract by Bankwest in Australia providing full RPO services from job requisition through onboarding including employment branding, establishing an innovation program for sourcing, and more
• IBM: awarded a learning services contract by a government entity in South Africa including content development and delivery of learning
• Aon Hewitt: renews and expands its multi-process HR outsourcing contract with BMO Financial Group for payroll, workforce administration, H&W administration, recruitment services, and compensation administration covering 46,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada for eight years.

There will likely be continued challenges from clients such as stalled decision-making or demands for lower pricing, and some service lines will fare better than others in this slow economy that is decelerating.

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NorthgateArinso Getting SaaS-y Starting with e-Learning Content

NorthgateArinso (NGA) has just announced its euHReka Inclusion Framework to provide transparent access to third party providers, HR professionals, and associated resources.  The euHReka platform includes payroll and talent management SaaS for learning, recruitment, performance management, compensation management, and succession planning.  It serves 80 clients and 800,000 employees, and is available in 100 countries and 32 languages.

Although NGA has been providing learning BPO (LBPO) since its acquisition of Convergys’ HR Management business in March 2010, and since learning is already a part of its euHReka platform, the company is aware of the heightened demand for e-learning content in the market.  Consequently, NGA’s first partnership on the new framework is with SkillSoft to add e-learning content to euHReka.  Subsequent content and applications will include:

• Compensation data
• Benefits programs
• Job boards
• Professional social networking sites.

NGA is wise to begin with e-learning.  In NelsonHall’s LBPO market analysis, published Q4 2010, traditional instructor-led classroom training (ILT) is expected to be reduced from ~50% of the market in terms of revenue to 40% by 2012 due to the explosion of e-learning.  As a result, content development is also rapidly growing.  NelsonHall’s LBPO report ranks content development second behind learning administration in terms of LBPO revenue and ahead of delivery, technology, and consulting. 

Some examples of e-learning contracts this year include:

• Accenture with HSBC
• Genpact with JobSkills in India for a 5-year content development contract (note: approximately 85% of Genpact’s courses are provided via e-learning)
• Edvantage Group with Yara International for safety e-learning (note: Edvantage Group’s H1 2011 financial results showed a 31% increase in sales and double-digit revenue growth y-o-y with EBITA increasing 168% to 5.9m NOK, compared to 2.2m NOK in H1 2010).

I believe we will continue to see significant increased demand for e-learning content for years to come, which will be further magnified by mobile learning (i.e., m-learning), especially for accessing content for self-paced e-learning when out of the office.  However, e-learning will not replace the uptick expected for virtual instructor-led training (VLT) because of the need to actively participate and focus on the learning task at hand in VLT.  I’ll write more about contracts for VLT and web 2.0 learning portals at a later date.  In the meantime, further analysis on the useage of e-learning by region and other associated information is available from NelsonHall.

Gary Bragar, HR Outsourcing Research Director, NelsonHall

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