The Resource Group (TRG) : Business Process Outsourcing Pakistan's Success Story
The Resource Group (TRG) : Business Process Outsourcing Pakistan's Success Story
The Resource Group (TRG) : Business Process Outsourcing Pakistan's Success Story
The TRG Business Model offshore locations made TRG one of the largest
TRG’s business model was based on a strategy and offshore BPO companies in the world. In view of its
structure that was pivoted around the fundamentals of large scale it became easier for TRG for absorbing
labor arbitrage value proposition, and at the same time fixed overheads such as bandwidth, real estate, etc.
was, also, highly scalable and executable. It was based (Khaishgi, 2008).
on an acquisition-driven model, which primarily involved
acquiring business services companies in North America Access to capital
and Europe, and providing offshore and onshore service In order to acquire companies in North America and
delivery to clients of the acquired companies. TRG’s Western Europe, TRG was in dire need to raise sufficient
offshore customer programs are manag ed by capital. The institutions in North America and Western
experienced onshore teams, with some of the employees Europe in the year 2002 were still reluctant to make
located “onshore” in North America and Europe and investments in the IT sector of the collapse of the dot
some ”offshore” in low cost locations. Thus, it provides com bubbles. TRG therefore decided to raise the
a blended or ”hybrid” solution. (TRG, Annual Report) required capital from low cost and buoyant capital
markets of India and Pakistan (Khaishgi, 2008). 205
Key Drivers of the TRG Strategy
The key drivers of the TRG strategy as envisaged by Location Considerations
the CEO of TRG are discussed below (Khaishgi, 2008). The TRG had deliberated whether to build its offshore
presence in Lahore Pakistan, or move it to other new
Maintain onshore customer relationships viable locations. Despite the challenges, of operating
The majority of the customers requiring BPO services in an emerging location, Pakistan, it decided to stay on
were concerned regarding whether to in maintain their at the same location in view of the bright future potential
existing vendor relationships after the takeover of their for the BPO industry in Pakistan (Khaishgi, 2008).
existing on-shore vendors by TRG and the subsequent
transfer of the business to offshore location. TRG’s Attractive fundamentals
were not only able to successfully to convince its existing Labor availability and operating environment, is a pre-
customers to leverage offshore savings but were also requisite for BPOs. TRG realized that Pakistan had
able to and selling new organic offshore businesses in the following advantages: (1) huge untapped labor pool
the marketplace (Khaishgi, 2008). of English-proficient graduates available in Pakistan
who are happy to accept wages that are 60% below
Leverage onshore domain expertise their US counterparts. (2) Estimated consolidated
In view of rapid growth of BPOs, there were accelerated operating costs in Pakistan were 30% lower than
promotions and high turnover of the employees. This countries such as India and Philippines. (3) The
resulted in lack of experienced supervisors, trainers willingness of the government toward making heavy
and managers, which had a negative effect on the investment in the infrastructure required by the BPOs
motivation amongst the employees. TRG’s realizing sector, as well as, providings other incentives to the
the importance of trained employees launched an investors (Khaishgi, 2008).
extensive training program for their employees to
overcome the problem (Khaishgi, 2008). Requirement for near native language
capability
Achieve scale rapidly Hybrid model is an extension of the onshore ”brands”.
Economies of scale is vital in reducing offshore costs. Therefore, it is crucial to recruit employees with near
The TRG due to is visionary approach of acquiring native language or neutral accent, especially, in the voice
on-shore business and transferring part of it to its business. TRG succeeded in recruiting employees that
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