When we used to assist customers with their large, complex outsourcing contracts we invariably locked horns with the Procurement Department. As a company purchaser they were incentivised to get the lowest price available. While that works really well for non-service agreements, for IT outsourced agreements it can be very risky. Our mantra was “the suppliers need to make money – just not too much money”.
One of the other key elements is that the risk for the parties is far from equal. As an example, Infosys net profit for 2021 was $2.6 billion on a revenue of $13.56 billion.
So, if you as a customer never paid them for the services they have only partially, or have not provided, it would not materially impact them. On the other hand, if they stop delivering all outsourced IT services, your organisation may be at real risk of not being able to operate.
Outsourcing is a tough business. Making a profit can be challenging –
- DXC Technology annual revenue for 2021 was $17.729B, a 9.44% decline from 2020.
- DXC Technology annual revenue for 2020 was $19.577B, a 5.67% decline from 2019.
- DXC Technology annual revenue for 2019 was $20.753B, a 4.51% decline from 2018.
The easy way to improve profitability is to not deliver the contracted services…
Over the years we have reviewed a large number of outsourcing contracts and have typically found that suppliers are very good at managing service level data, pushing in-scope items back onto the customer and linking deliverables such that they never get delivered.
What used to be built into first generation outsourcing deals are now done as projects. The problem is that the