Center of Excellence (COE)
There is a lot of talk around the creating Centers of Excellence (COE) in the business circles today. The concept of Centers of Excellence has become very popular especially in the technology driven ITES & BPO sector. With emergence of SMB players in this market, the industry leaders have started positioning themselves as Domain Experts & Industry Leaders with developingCenters of Excellence in various domains/verticals/horizontals.
What is a Center of Excellence (COE) ?
Centers of Excellence (COEs) helps achieving Operational & Business Excellence by establishing frameworks for “Best Practices” & move towards “Next Practices” in delivery & development of product/service and the positive impact it has on the overall business growth.
The notion behind developing a Centers of Excellence is to insert innovation in the culture of organization by breaking the existing silos and enabling cross-functional engagements. A Centers of Excellence’s vision is to develop & strengthen the domain/vertical/horizontal expertise of an organization to offer high & predictable quality at minimum cost.
A Centers of Excellence is usually sanctioned by senior leadership in order to shake things up and to unearth issues lying under the carpet that might be causing the roadblocks in its growth. Developing Centers of Excellence is taking a step towards improving the operational performance and move towards the overall growth of business. Organizations are aggressively using the Centers of Excellence to showcase themselves as industry leaders and a differentiating factor among their peers/competitors.
Key benefits of deploying Centers of Excellence initiatives in organizations:
Benchmarking
Develop standardized benchmarking framework across the organization
Benchmarking within the organization as well as across the industry
Facilitates inter-department learning with-in the organization
Continuous Improvement
Centers of Excellence frameworks to push for continuous improvements
Develop and grow expertise at each operational level
Focus on high quality
Thought Leadership
Development of domain/vertical/horizontal thought leadership
Research papers & case studies
Relevant industry certifications
Best Practices
Adopting best knowledge management practices
Consolidating best practices across the organization and sharing of best practices
Focus on shifting from “Best Practices” towards “Next Practices”
Fuel Innovation
Facilitates the right environment to fuel innovation in an organization
ITES & BPO players have been using the Centers of Excellence models to strengthen their domain specific trainings, contributing to knowledge pool, creation and documentation of best practices, benchmarking against the industry best practices, moving towards operational excellence, cost controls and various other Centers of Excellence led initiatives. The expertise of the Centers of Excellence teams is frequently leveraged from various client handling situations to strategic projects, bidding for new projects, pre-sales engagements with prospects, converting prospects to customers, managing smooth transition, handling delivery challenges, etc.
Center of Excellence help organizations integrate their operating siloes around the customer and helps establish a framework of continues improvement of quality & drives innovation so important in today’s dynamic and volatile eco-system.
You may like to go through our Centers of Excellence Case Study on the same website, to get a feel of how our team has helped our clients to develop Centers of Excellence and leverage the benefits resulting into cost optimization and business growth.
Should you be interested to have a dialogue on the subject do write to us on contact@hexagonconsulting.co
And of course we’d love to hear your thoughts and views on the subject.- so do share your perspectives too on this blog page.