CEVA Logistics, the global logistics company formerly known as TNT Logistics, has signed a five-year financial business process outsourcing contract with Accenture.
The outsourcer will support processes including accounts payable, accounts receivable, month end close, balance sheet reconciliations and reporting from its delivery centres in India, Romania and Argentina.
Accenture will also provide consultancy services under the deal, helping the company to transform its finance function to "exhibit greater control over cost management, minimize revenue leakage and create more consistency in business processes", it said in a statement.
CEVA has already worked with Accenture for the past three years.
The Holland-headquartered company, which was created after a private equity firm acquired the logistics division of Australian, uses offshore IT outsourcing services, from Indian provider HCL.
Speaking to Information Age in 2009, the company’s CIO and human resources director Peter Dew explained that reforming IT management processes was also a motivation to outsource to HCL.
"We chose to … replace some of our processes, which weren’t that great, with some of HCL’s processes," he said at the time. "These included the whole application development process, some ITIL-based service management processes and some in the infrastructure area as well."
Marks and Spencer talks about Cognizant
In other outsourcing news, UK retailer Marks & Spencer today made its first public statement about its engagement with Indian provider Cognizant.
In 2009, the iconic company outsourced 56 IT jobs to Cognizant, cutting 20 other IT roles in the process. Shareholders questioned the wisdom of the decision at the time.
Today, Cognizant issued a press release which seemed to suggest that the engagement had not got off to an altogether satisfactory start.
The release quotes Damone Quigley, head of infrastructure and application services at M&S, as saying there had been "a number of service improvement initiatives delivered by Cognizant over the last year [and] we are now more confident about promising our business better system availability, capacity, and stability."
According to a new report from UK analysts TechMarketView, fast-growing Cognizant is poised to "leap frog" its larger Indian rivals in 2011.
