Quick Wins: CIOs show how to keep costs in check

You know how ugly it is out there. The cost of products we buy every day is jumping. It's only been a few weeks since the Consumer Price Index made the news for days on end as TV channels and newspapers tracked its steady climb. Globally, banks are being bailed out and markets forecast doom as consumers snapped their wallets shut.

CEOs expect the economy to grow at a skimpy 1.3 percent this year, according to a survey of 110 chief executives conducted by the Business Roundtable. That's the slowest growth rate predicted by the CEO community since the post-9/11 and post-bubble year of 2002.

"Companies have to do something now," says Erik Dorr, senior IT research director at the Hackett Group, a technology management consulting firm. But "it's better to think it through than make cuts in a reactionary way." We scouted for examples from across the world and India of tactical projects that you can execute in a few months and reap rewards quickly.

You have to be smart to keep your job. One way to display your smarts is to seek and destroy all money-sucking waste at your company. Here's how:

Curb Attrition

Savings: Rs 70,000 (US$1,392) per recruit

They call it the 'honeymoon period.' But it wasn't sweet for Intelenet Global Services, whose new recruits joined the company only to leave it in the first 90 days (their training period).

For all the training and money the company invested, it got back sleepless nights. Intelenet Global Services is a business process outsourcing company, which recruits a minimum of 500 employees every month and spends between Rs 50,000 and Rs 70,000 to nurture a new hire before he or she is inducted into the business.

With a significant attrition rate during this incubation period, a lot of this money was being wasted. "If we spent in the range of Rs 50,000 to Rs 70,000 on one person and there's 20 percent attrition, you can estimate the direct monetary losses, forget about the loss of manpower for as many days in future," says Deshpande.

But in the BPO industry, attrition comes with the territory. "If we are not hiring people with the right skill set, it causes attrition. Any discomfort in the mind of a new employee can result in attrition. If a person is hired for one capability and he is put into an alien process, it's quite possible that he will leave," explains Rajendra Deshpande, CTO, Intelenet Global.

With so much being spent on a new recruit, it became crucial for the organization to keep an eye on a new recruit's lifecycle during the pre-hire and orientation phases to understand why they were leaving. Intelenet couldn't know because there was no real-time data available to gauge that.

As each department and business unit managed its own data separately, it resulted in numerous isolated excel sheets. A lack of a centralized data warehouse was beginning to worry the company and its COO, Prabhu Srinivasan, turned to Deshpande. "He looked very bugged with this issue and demanded for a single spreadsheet instead of disjointed islands of information," says Deshpande.