Flatworld emerges a winner with Business Continuity services

The Customer

The customer is a leading general insurer in the UK and part of a group that is one of the world's largest financial service providers with a presence in over 70 countries worldwide. The company's captive offshore development center in India was set up to provide business process outsourcing solutions.

The Need

In an environment that depends on daily, minute-to-minute customer interaction and business decisions over the phone, the company could not afford downtime. Recognizing the importance of ensuring Business Continuity in the event of outages, the company was looking for a highly reliable local vendor to provide fail-safe backup for the operations of its captive offshore development center in India.

The company already had disaster recovery strategies in place in the UK, and continued to use the UK DR facility after moving work offshore. However, the company was conscious of the fact that the time and cost of moving people from India to UK during a disaster would be too high to provide a practical solution in the long term. The company decided to identify a local vendor to provide DR services to its successful offshore BPO center in South India. This would enable the company to concentrate on expanding its operations in its existing location itself instead of identifying an alternate city for its expansion plans, which would have meant an exponential rise in the associated management costs.

The Challenge

• To provide Business Continuity services to meet the exacting requirements of the large global customers of the customer
• To have the technology, people and processes in place that would enable seamless transition of the process from the company's captive offshore development center in India with minimal disruption in the company's day-to-day operations, while maintaining the same high standards of service

The Achievement

The customer did a complete due diligence of our facility and we emerged as the only player from their shortlist of companies.

Our detailed proposal impressed the customer and included some innovative suggestions regarding the customer's network connectivity to our DR site. These suggestions were eventually accepted and implemented by the customer. Our past experience in offering similar services to a US customer was another reassuring factor that built the company's confidence in our capabilities.

The company signed a 3-year contract for Business Continuity services with the tough clause that if the commissioning test did not succeed for whatever reason, the deal would be cancelled. It was only after sign-off that testing was undertaken, and exceeded the expectations of the customer.

The Disaster Recovery site was up and running within the time specified. In keeping with our partnership approach, testing was undertaken jointly with the customer prior to 'go-live'. The testing involved a mock drill to test the SLAs and the site was live within the specified time frame of 48 hours. After operations went live, all annual test requirements were met.

The Results

The customer mitigated operational risks with Flatworld's reliable Business Continuity services, which offered consistently high levels of quality and efficiency.

Flatworld believes in long-term business relationships and the benefits of year-on-year savings through a 3-year contract are passed on to the customer. Our customer now has a reliable DR vendor, thus enabling it to focus on the consistent growth of its own captive offshore BPO center in India.