Q: How important is knowledge for competitive advantage in today’s economic environment? Ans: Knowledge is absolutely fundamental in achieving competitive advantage in today’s market, especially in today’s economic situation. More generally speaking, there are many things that can create competitive advantage such as unique manufacturing techniques, intellectual property, but over the time in competitive markets these advantages are slowly lost. What truly differentiates organizations and allows them to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage is the process of making intelligent decisions everyday, extracting insight from your operations, your customer information to take better decisions in the market place. To do this consistently, increasing distance between you and your competition, if an organization learns to use knowledge against its competition and for the benefit of its customers then truly that’s a competitive advantage that no other organization can easily copy and that to me is sustainable competitive advantage. Q: What are the challenges with current state of knowledge processes within organizations? Ans: Biggest challenge when you talk about knowledge processes within an organization is where did these knowledge processes actually exist. Naturally, there are certain parts of organizations such as the risk department for bank that are well developed, it is fairly evident within the organization that this is an analytically rich environment and those are typically well looked after, well staffed and well resourced. But analytical needs within larger organizations span a variety of different functional areas, planning, sales, marketing, R&D, and it is where to find organizations that have well developed knowledge processes across the entire span of their functions. The first thing is that management is simply not aware of where these knowledge processes reside. They are also not aware may be of what kind of an impact these knowledge processes are having on the decisions they are taking and whether there is an optimal impact, whether that impact could be enhanced. These processes are also scattered within an organization in the sense that they span across a variety of different functions. On the other hand, they are often consolidated around headquarters but really visible in other parts of typically global organizations. A good example is a very large company might have tremendous amount of knowledge processes at its headquarters in the US, but when it comes to their operations in emerging markets like India and China obviously critical markets from a going forward perspective, these younger organizations are typically starved of the analytical capabilities that are enjoyed by departments and functions closer to the headquarter situation. So that’s another feature of knowledge processes. Another typical problem is that organizations find it difficult to recruit and staff the talent to fill these knowledge process roles. Of course, if you are large organizations, if you are in the top 1-3 may be even 5 place in an industry then talent like this would like to work for your organization. But companies that are smaller or companies that are less analytically sophisticated would find it difficult to find the right talent and talent in adequate numbers to staff these knowledge processes in a manner that will be optimal. Not to mention that these resources where the individual has a functional capability like he is a statistician or some other type of analyst, but also has domain knowledge, is familiar with the pharmaceutical industry or familiar with the CPG industry, these are expensive resources to find and recruit. So these are some of the challenges that organizations face when it comes to their knowledge processes. Q: How can organizations become knowledge centric? Ans: If organizations want to become knowledge centric there are 3 basic steps we believe they should take. The first and the most important one is to set up the right kind of culture or begin to change the culture of the organization, so that quantitative approaches to decision making and problem solving are encouraged and rewarded within the middle level management team. Hopefully, this entire culture change comes from the fact that senior management gets more number oriented in the way it takes its decisions. Intuition will always have a very important role; business leaders have contacts with respect to markets, competitors etc, but it is obviously extremely important in taking decisions. But whenever decisions are strategic such as which markets to play in, which products to choose from an R&D pipeline or whether they are tactical, talking about how money is spent on marketing expenditures on a weekly-monthly-quarterly basis or deciding price points for different SKU variance. All of these decisions, if the senior management encourages the organization to take these decisions with a fair amount of quantitative analytics and research, supporting them, then over time the culture of the organization will change and it will want to become more knowledge centric. That’s step number one. The second thing is that to set up knowledge processes around the areas where you want to take quantitative led decisions. This means having the right people in the right roles, having standardized approaches to solving problems throughout the organization, across geographies, making sure that the people are appropriately skilled to address the opportunity and share appropriately within the organization. So that really is the next step; setting up the right knowledge processes, standardizing them, making sure that they achieve the right quality from a decision making perspective. The third important thing is to make sure that these groups that you set up within the organization, even if they are primarily supporting certain functional areas like sales and marketing, are setup with an appropriate manner so that the cost for them is variable, there is efficiency, and the way talent is use it is centralized in a manner that variety of different parts of an organization can leverage it. So, getting the right delivery structure for these knowledge processes is the third most important step in making the organization knowledge centric. Q: What value addition will outsourcing of knowledge processes bring to companies? Ans: Creating culture change within an organization really is something, which senior management is best place to do obviously. We think that as a provider that has worked with a number of organizations that are knowledge centric, we can suggest ways in which senior management can bring these changes about. I think the value addition of an organization like WNS is fundamentally on the knowledge process design side as well as on the delivery structure side. So having worked with a number of very large companies and having been involved in the way they aggregate and disseminate knowledge, we are in a position to guide our clients on how these knowledge processes can be designed. This is across any function whether it is sales, marketing, R&D or planning or any one of these. We are in a position to help companies actually design these knowledge processes. More importantly, perhaps deliver them through our operations capabilities which mean that these processes will be appropriately designed, they will be consistent, they will be quality checked, they will be backed by the right kind of resources, whether they are statisticians or MBAs, analysts or specialists within an industry such as doctors in the pharmaceutical space or marketers. So, organizations like ours are in a position to recruit this kind of talent, making it available on tap, which variabalizes the cost structure for our customers and then finally make it scalable, whether customers are large international conglomerates we have to deliver this kind of analytical support across 50-70 different countries. We are in a position to provide these resources in a highly scalable manner. This would be the real value, which a knowledge process outsourcer such as WNS could provide to a customer. Q: What are the benefits of investing in knowledge centers of excellence? Ans: Let me take a few minutes to explain what a knowledge center of excellence actually is. A knowledge center of excellence is basically an analytical hub. These hubs contain a variety of highly specialized resources. Some of these resources have functional expertise such as statisticians or data engineers; other resources have domain expertise, so they may be specialist in marketing or in the pharmaceutical industry or in the retail industry. These analytical hubs basically bring together these resources to solve business issues that range across a large global organization. So these teams plug into our client organizations in a couple of fundamental ways. One is that they plug into the company at a global level. So, each of the resources in these teams or at least the front facing resources in these teams is connected to one or other geography within our clients. They also plug into our clients at a functional level, so we have teams within these groups that support the sales department; we have other teams that support marketing, other teams that support R&D. So, these are the two ways in which these knowledge centers of excellence plug into our client organizations. The benefits to customers from these environments are really twofold. First and foremost, these are the benefits that accrue from a typical shared services environment. So these resources are scalable, they can be positioned in low cost environments, their utilization and productivity is high, processes can be standardized etc. So those are the more obvious benefits that accrue from these centers of excellence. Of course, these groups also perform the basic analytical workload that the sales team requires or the marketing team requires, so they are obviously providing the basic support for these functional areas. But the additional advantage of having these centers of excellence is that these environments are capable of handling analytical processes that span across the functional silos of an organization. A good example is forecasting. Forecasting as a process is a knowledge intensive process and analytically and quantitatively rigorous process in most sophisticated organizations, whether this is volume forecasting or revenue forecasting or any of those kinds of things. So, this process actually requires a fairly sophisticated set of skill sets, but more importantly it is high collaborative in nature. The process requires inputs from a variety of different departments; sales, planning, marketing, MIS, finance. It is also is needed to give output to all of these different functional areas. If you have these kinds of knowledge centers of excellence and you have analytical teams that support each of these different functions because these teams are collocated in a shared services environment, it is very easy to make them collaborate over the business issues that need to be solved by the organization, forecasting being an example. So when you look at the benefits of these centers of excellence, the obvious ones that are around the shared services environment; the scale, the efficiency and then of course there is the benefit of overcoming corporate silos to solve analytical problems more optimally. ability to create knowledge process centers of excellence.

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