Corporate Location Services
Rigorous and innovative location selection is the key to delivering the business objectives of projects. The CSES team has assisted many of the world’s leading companies with their location selection, including American Express, Avis, Black & Decker, COLT Telecom, Diageo, Kimberley Clark, Merril Lynch, and Whirlpool. Companies continuously change their location footprints as they re-engineer, seek cost reduction, enter new markets or need to find specialist and scarce resources. New locations can often deliver these solutions. Our expertise in locating Shared Service Centres (SSCs) shows how this can be achieved. We have advised 35 companies with their SSC location decisions and have an unrivalled understanding of the kinds of cost savings that can be achieved from new locations. Typical labour arbitrage gains of 25-50% can still be achieved for SSCs, dependent on where current jobs are located, and the skills required. Examples of our projects include:
- A new Pan-European customer reservation centre solution for a major car rental company created a twin hub configuration. All countries in West Europe were examined and a shortlist of cities rapidly developed and benchmarked against existing operations. The availability of languages, costs and an effective operating environment were key drivers. City candidates were validated through fieldwork with the client team. Barcelona and Manchester as twin hubs were preferred to a single centre to minimize risks with language availability and maximize cost and service benefits.
-
Our client was considering relocating some of its back-office locations from Ireland to either India or Eastern Europe to gain cost reduction. We identified best candidate cities in these new locations and benchmarked them against the existing operation. As the existing operation had already achieved process savings from re-engineering and economies of scale from consolidation, the remaining realisable gain was from labour arbitrage. The number of jobs was relatively small, and the one-off costs of moving were significant. The payback could not justify the investment or operational risks associated with re-location. In this instance, there was no business case to support a re-location.
For further information regarding our corporate location advisory services, please contact 
Barry Bright or Jan Smit.