View from China: Big (Entry) Data

I have just returned from yet another fascinating visit to China. This is the third time Iâve visited Lifewood in the last three years. Lifewood is now Pactera BPO. Most of you probably wonder â who is Pactera?

Pactera is the biggest IT vendor in China, faving grown through acquisitions and mergers to become a 20,000 strong company, with dozens of delivery centers around the country and a Fortune 500 client base. Right now, Lifewood is responsible for developing Pacteraâs BPO arm â not an easy task, considering the strong players in the BPO sphere and the area of specialization Lifewood has developed over the years.

The outsourcing community has taken interest in China, but the general agreement (including mine) so far has been that Chinese vendors are lagging behind Indian vendors. This is still true, but the gap is closing and rather fast.

I was once again struck by the nimble and innovative approach Lifewood is introducing to outsourcing, challenging our concepts about specialization and entry to new markets. Just to remind you, I have previously reported on the large-scale operations Lifewood has developed in Wuxi and Dongguan, where thousands of high school graduates transcribe hand written documents (e.g. census documents, airline maintenance forms, marriage certificates dated back to the 17th century, etc) into 23 different languages without either understanding the language nor the context of the information they key in. You can read that column here .

I also reported on Lifewood merging voice with data entry services into one delivery center having realized the inter-changeability of the skills needed for voice and data entry operations in the multi-channel contact center sector. This delivery center has grown significantly as customers have realized the value of multiple service channels as an emerging service concept.

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So as my visit to Dongguan was approaching, I emailed my contact in advance to check on the latest developments. I got the usual reply: "Come and see".

One of Lifewoodâs long standing customers is a large Asian airline. Lifewood has been processing hand written maintenance reports for this customer for the last 2 years. The number of documents that Lifewood processes is phenomenal, more than 500,000 documents in the first 6 months and nearly 2 million documents by now. Sounds impressive, but where is the innovative business model?

As Lifewood transcribed these documents, a large dataset was created. The dataset was populated with information about maintenance procedures per aircraft, time taken for the procedure, parts replaced, engineers who carried out the work, non-routine maintenance etc. None of this was captured prior to the engagement with Lifewood, so while all this information was documented in hand written forms, the information and knowledge embedded in these forms was not put to use. The potential of the dataset surfaced when, in one of the meetings, the customer referred to the delivery as âLifewood Dataâ. Both customer and Lifewood immediately realized that transcribing the information is just the beginning of the journey. The challenge is now to dig into the data and learn about maintenance procedures and their effect of expenditure over time, per aircraft.

And so, another journey has started for Lifewood. It is now working closely with Pacteraâs Big Data Analytics team to tackle this opportunity with the use of advanced technologies and methodologies. Interestingly, as Lifewood taps into this data, the airline analysts are getting excited about re-constructing events around each aircraft, and figuring out maintenance routines and their expenditure patterns.

Chinese IT and BPO vendors still face major challenges, in particular in those areas where multiple language skills are key to the service experience. However, Chinese vendors are finding ways to expand their services by working around such barriers, for example as in the case here, by leveraging large-scale data entry projects and offering value-adding services in the form of data analytics.

Thinking about their evolutionary path, I would say that Chinese vendors have established their credibility in the global m arket and are now increasing the scale of their operations in China and around the globe.