Genpact: Bringing Lean Design Principles to Cloud Business Process Redesign

Recently, we discussed Genpact’s evolving cloud service offerings and capabilities with the firm’s Global Cloud Services Leader, Vikrant Karnik. HFS was keen to understand how the firm leverages its deep business process outsourcing (BPO) and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) heritage to bring its knowledge and skills supporting global customer requirements for IT workloads, business process transformation, and talent management into a cloud context.

As most tier-one players and niche cloud-native providers already lead in the space with large-scale cloud transformation capacity and competence, Genpact must differentiate itself and play to its strengths. Early in the conversation, it became clear that Genpact is applying proven methodologies like Six Sigma and lean design principles as core framing tools for how it can help customers on their journey to becoming cloud native. Genpact’s strong cloud know-how comes from rich operational experience supporting siloed multinational organizations and identifying where lean process design fits into delivering business value.

Genpact started its cloud transformation journey by enabling business process as a service (BPaaS) roughly three years ago. With its recent Enquero acquisition, Genpact laid a strong foundation for its cloud capabilities to deliver operational transformation at scale. With the acquisition, Genpact strengthens its data and cloud technologies team to drive operational transformation services through advanced analytics. Adding more data and analytics resources to the digital transformation team, Genpact subtly sets its entry into the cloud space.

Genpact is combining cloud capabilities with operational competence

Genpact leverages its BPO heritage and believes it can help clients with their cloud transformation journey by collaborating closely with customers at strategic, operational, and technical levels. Currently, the firm focuses on three areas: alignment, data, and operations. Within these core areas, Genpact helps clients in their cloud journey to optimize business lines and processes. The firm applies these services to various enterprises, including some of the world’s largest retailers, utility companies, and financial firms. Services include integrating data warehouses and databases, migrating business processes and IT workloads, and modernizing applications for cloud-native deployment. We attribute Genpact’s success to its rich experiences gained from business process outsourcing, where deals included talent management, information management, data migration, and role-based services development.

By applying lean design principles to modern business processes and insights, Genpact leverages its strengths and builds partnerships with hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google’s Cloud Platform. At present, Genpact’s cloud service portfolio touches upon cloud services’ value stream elements—plan, transform, migrate, and operate. Genpact has a thorough understanding of how customers measure the success of operational processes and delivers desired, measurable business objectives. Genpact markets its cloud service portfolio as “Smart Cloud,” which leverages many of its BPaaS tools and accelerators already in place with customers.

Timing is everything: Genpact is accelerating its cloud offering at the right time to harness the market’s momentum

Though Genpact started its cloud journey three years ago, the promotion of its capabilities has only recently been in the spotlight. As enterprises exit the global pandemic, cloud adoption has never been more critical. In our recent pulse survey, 67% of respondents agree strongly or somewhat (see Exhibit 1) that enterprises will focus on moving their business processes to the cloud in the next 12 months. As managing costs is a concern for cloud migration and digital transformation, Genpact knows how to quickly show results based on decades of cost conscience engagements in the BPO realm.

Exhibit 1: Enterprise leaders are focused on using the Cloud to drive Infrastructure and Workload transformation

Sample: Surveying 801 of the Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research, 2021 Pulse survey

When it comes to outsourcing business processes, Genpact knows how to engage with its clients. The firm has intentionally chosen not to be a massive end-to-end cloud transformation company. Rather, Genpact is betting on a focus on moving high-value business processes to the cloud, such as accelerating clients’ F&A, HRO, and customer experience functions into the cloud. Genpact brings quantifiable metrics for how a business can measure and adopt new cloud-based solutions, but it doesn’t force change; rather, it is willing to work evolutionarily to ensure success. Lead design thinking plays a large part in delivering tangible business outcomes by optimizing specific operational processes.

Genpact’s operational transformation journey aligns with the HFS OneOffice™

Enterprises are at different stages of the cloud transformation journey. For large, siloed organizations, most business process transformation initiatives failed to deliver value. Genpact promises to deliver business value by bringing a proven approach to solving a customer’s operational pain points. Some of Genpact’s solution offerings and approaches reflect the HFS OneOffice emerging technology platform which focused on a single interface, integrated dashboards to provide contextual information, and integrated data in real-time across plants and IT systems.

The Bottom Line: Genpact leverages its business process DNA to weave its cloud transformation capabilities

With Genpact’s BPO heritage, the firm plays very well within its strengths in process optimization methodologies. They believe that by approaching a problem by beginning with a perspective that seeks to understand the process, its flaws, and seeks opportunities for incremental, intentional improvements leads to sustainable long-term improvement for achieving outcomes. Genpact believes it can add significant value to your cloud transformation journey by approaching it with a business first and “lean” methodology.

Furthermore, Genpact has better know-how that identifies which processes to move first to the cloud, what workflow to integrate, and how to provide data integration and dashboard help for a better result. Genpact already delivers excellent value to enterprises in the operational transformation space. If Genpact focuses only on cloud operational transformation, plays within its strength, and doubles down further, it has a great opportunity in the cloud.