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Contents 
Introduction
Profitability plus
Improving on multinationals
Niche skills on tap
The local touch
In defence of multinationals
Executive summary |
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Impressively deep reservoirs of black ink are also important to Michael Browne, CEO of local services firm Datacom.
"We have grown 250 percent in five years and are consistently profitable. That says a lot about how we are as good as any other company from anywhere else," he says proudly, adding that much of that success comes from customers finding that while multinationals are good at some services, quality is not high across the board. When that happens, Datacom swoops.
"We see that a lot of organisations that traditionally outsource to a multinational go through the first phase of the contract and then move away from the one-size-fits-all approach," he says.
"We find we are very successful at picking up pieces of work when they re-negotiate their contracts." Browne believes Datacom and other Australian companies succeed at this point because, having grown up in competition with multinationals, they have learned to compete at the same level. "A lot of work in Australia goes to tender and local companies have to compete as aggressively as multinationals to win it," he says. "And we don't compete on price; we compete and win on delivery capability."
"There are no soft options. Government and corporates benchmark globally, so we have to match global benchmarks to succeed."
One element of those benchmarks is the ability to demonstrate quality. Datacom proved its quality by being the first local firm to attain the COPC 2000 call centre standard and is now working towards ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) certification.
"There is a lot of maturity here," he says. "We run pretty major systems for big companies, we design our own IT systems to deliver predictable outcomes and I am happy to stand up and compare to any global player on the quality of our systems."
Rightsizing
Processes can even be of higher quality than that of the multinationals, because they can be more appropriate for local companies, says Derek Rippingale, joint managing director of 200-strong services company Professional Advantage, which specialises in working with midmarket customers.
| "We wonder how right-sized a multinational's methodologies are for a local midmarket company." Derek Rippingdale, Professional Advantage |
"If you are not in the target market for a services company, that best practice can become overhead and you need to ask if you are really in the market for that level of approach or not."
"I'm not saying multinationals are bad, I'm saying they serve a purpose. It comes down to matchmaking."
"Within every strength there is a weakness and we wonder how right-sized a multinational's methodologies are for a local midmarket company."
