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On Monday, IBM announced it had signed Sunoco to a multi-year procurement BPO deal (for Spend Matters comparative analysis of IBM’s procurement outsourcing capabilities, please click here and here to read more). What is most interesting to me about this deal, however, is not that IBM won it — they are a strong player in the procurement BPO market, no doubt — but rather the fact that Sunoco, which does not rank among the most sophisticated of procurement operations relative to Exxon Mobile and other leaders by our analysis, has made the BPO plunge in an attempt to leapfrog its current procurement position. Moreover, it also shows that companies are willing to tackle this buy-side leapfrogging effort as part of a multi-tower outsourcing approach (the IBM relationship also includes the following areas: “Application Enhancement, Application Maintenance and Finance and Accounting”).
I suspect that based on the magnitude of the deal, that it was driven at the corporate management and executive level inside Sunoco (even though in most procurement BPO deals I’ve observed, procurement leadership has some role, even if they don’t have an equal voice, in the process)…
