The ability to continue to innovate and transform processes and utilise new, original ideas within the terms of customer services is more important in the field of outsourcing business processes and IT than in most other sectors. This is a sector in which the “Zero Distance” principle, which in practice means as close to the customer as possible, awareness of all the customer’s needs and the opportunity to satisfy these needs perfectly, works very well.
“Innovation is not an issue for small groups, management or specialists,” Jan Skoták, Director of the Infosys Regional Centre in the Czech Republic explains the key concept that led to the award-winning project. “It is an issue for all the employees of a specific company. Everyone at our company tries to think differently, innovatively. The objective is to make an effort to challenge the status quo. The entire company is only able to make progress as a result of a number of such new ideas.”
Don’t throw away values
What is actually the principle of the winning project? It is mainly the concept that people generate ideas, but these ideas are only beneficial if there is a system enabling them to be immediately evaluated and implemented. Otherwise many ideas, which could have been excellent, are lost. The system, which began functioning in January 2016 within the terms of the Czech Infosys centre, is simple in principle. If any employee has an idea for improving the current work method, however slightly, or if he is aware of any sort of “obstacle”, removal of which would improve an action, increase its speed or effectiveness, he simply places his idea on the “idea platform”, which collects all suggestions. This idea is evaluated within several days, and implemented as soon as possible.
Speed means money
“People can see that something is happening, that their ideas are actually being used and that things really are changing,” Jan Skoták says with pleasure, and he adds, “Our people also appreciate the speed at which this happens, as well as the specific benefits for our customers. Anyone whose idea has been used is rightly entitled to be proud of himself and this is motivating for him and his colleagues.”
The system has been working very wellsince it commenced. Throughout the nine months since it was launched over 200 ideas have been implemented, which have generated a value of several million dollars. This seemingly enormous sum is based on how the supplier / customer relationship works in outsourcing business processes and IT. According to the contract, the value of payments customers make for services to the supplier usually also depends on how the supplier continues to improve the effectiveness of its services. And this is naturally impossible without innovation.
Quality people in a quality company
However, financial motivation alone is not enough for continuous generation of ideas. The fact that the ideas are acknowledged and continuous reinforcement of Infosys as an innovative company, is also an important factor.
“Today, nine months after the project was launched, the platform continues to generate a very satisfactory number of ideas and I believe that this will continue. We evaluated nine new ideas only last week and all of them are very beneficial….,” Jan Skoták concludes.
