House of Commons - Trade and Industry

Select Committee on Trade and Industry Written Evidence

APPENDIX 17

Memorandum by the National Outsourcing Association

SYNOPSIS

Outsourcing has been part of the commercial landscape for so long now, that there is a tendency to for industry and governmental leaders to pass it by, dismissing it subliminally as something their organisation has either "done" or "doesn't subscribe to".

That is a pity, as this paper will argue that only a fraction of the potential value has yet been extracted with this strategic approach to business structuring. In short the UK is barely scratching the surface.

Through this White Paper review of the outsourcing approach, the NOA hopes to encourage a movement to greater efficiency and quality in UK business, fostered by a radical re-evaluation of the means of achieving strategic objectives. In its wake this will bring increases in productivity, profitability, global competivity, and enhanced economic growth that our leaders and citizens can jointly benefit from.

Moreover, the NOA will argue, that the UK is ideally placed in Europe to capitalise on such trends and set the pace, which other community members will find it hard to match. At the same time it can ensure that the gap opened out by pace-making US corporates and government agencies is closed.

Additionally, such initiatives, it is argued, will foster the UK-based growth of a new, smarter and focussed breed of system and process specialist businesses that support the emerging lean-structure corporates. These will be ideally positioned to develop UK export business both within Europe and the rapidly developing markets currently associated with offshore outsourcing destinations.

A UK government-led initiative, which the NOA seeks to foster, would set as its objective the narrowing if not eradication of efficiency performance gaps, securing the place of the major corporates and governmental agencies as front-runners on both the European and Global stages.

The resultant sea-change in the employment landscape will need careful management by government to avoid undue social friction either delaying or halting such necessary revitalisation of corporate structures. Again the UK is well placed to minimise such social friction given legislative innovations in employment law and its policies for encouraging continuous learning, re-skilling and re-deployment.

Any government-led initiative, then, would need to involve a fitness-for-purpose review of its continuous learning, re-skilling, and re-deployment mechanisms. Additionally, a review of the supporting employment legislation (eg TUPE and ARD) would be required to ensure that the UK citizens' rights continue to be protected in a way that is transparently fair.

Any such agenda of organisational revitalisation on the scale envisaged would not be achievable without the process being transparently fair to UK employees, and without a commitment to drive through the benefits to all of the resultant economic growth.

1. OUTSOURCING

1.1 What is it?

The NOA has, from its inception, subscribed to a concise and pithy definition of outsourcing that predates the academic references cited here by over a decade, and this is:

"Outsourcing is the procurement of a value-creating activity that either was or could have been performed in-house".[80]

The NOA has always favoured this formulation because it recognised early on that the new venture, the rapidly growing SME, and the start-up always faced the decision of whether to employ staff or buy a service. By choosing to buy the service it was effectively outsourcing the direct employment option.

The transfer of assets and staff, then, are judged neither necessary nor sufficient conditions to define outsourcing, although they are often outcomes when such outsourcings occur in mature corporates.

1.2 What are its origins?

At a stretch, there are those that maintain outsourcing's philosophical antecedents can be traced to the turn of the nineteenth century, and the publishing of Ricardo's economic Law of Comparative Advantage. [81]According to Ricardo, the value of the entire economy would have a greater increase if providers would focus all their capabilities on producing those goods in which they had a relative competitive advantage.

Be that as it may, outsourcing took another 160 years to make a real impact on the business landscape, probably beginning to make itself felt in the mid to late 1970s at a time when the US industry was trying to re-invent itself out of recession. Thus, in 1982 Peters and Waterman in their seminal work In Search of Excellence, [82]set down two of the cornerstones of the outsourcing creed, by drawing on research into the adopted behaviours of successful US corporates, namely:

— Stick to your knitting (core competencies).

— Judge excellence in terms of your competition.

It took the work of another luminary, Michael Porter, [83]at around the same time, to suggest that corporate strategy itself should be moulded by the need to build competitive advantage, and thus lay the other cornerstone of strategic outsourcing.

By the early eighties a three point theoretical prototype existed for the new corporate, a lean organisation, which would build its strategic response to the marketplace in terms of:

— Establishing competitive advantage.

— Focussing on the only those competencies that nurtured such advantage while outsourcing the rest.

— Outsourcing only to service providers offering quality services that could be Benchmarked and proved against the competition.

As we shall see it took a while for fashion, practice, and supply to get anywhere near to matching the theory.

1.3 Why has it become an indispensable business tool?

"Outsourcing used to be viewed as little more than. . .a tactic for reducing costs of back-room functions such as payroll, and IT".[84]

Indeed much of the early media attention centred around the IT space. Initially, the outsourcing of infrastructure was the managerial focus, data centres in the 1980s, wide area networks in the early 1990s, and local area networks and desktops in the mid to late nineties. By the millennium, the whole IT function was considered game for outsourcing, and at the same time other business processes were also being put under the spotlight, including human resources, finance, logistics, engineering, product design and manufacturing. "All of a sudden, outsourcing had morphed into a critical management tool".[85]

Critical it might be, strategic, however, not quite yet. Much of the drive to outsourcing has stemmed from functional reviews within organisations, exploration of the supply side of the market to gain assurance of service quality, and a subsequent outsource based upon marginal cost improvements. This is not yet the transformational drive for competitive advantage to which Porter wished the corporates to aspire.

Nevertheless, outsourcing undoubtedly has become mainstream. In a recent survey[86] of 2,000 HR directors and managers—sampled to reflect the full, breadth of the economy (size and sector)—it was concluded that nearly 70% of UK organisations outsource at least some of their activities. Interestingly, in the same survey those organisations that outsourced more than five business activities (ie just over 5% of the sample) appeared to gain the greatest benefits. 83% of these claimed that "outsourcing had simply become the established way of working", 85% said "it enabled them to concentrate on their core business", 78% "believe it saves their company time and money", over two-thirds "believe their overall quality of service has improved and/or the outsourced areas have become more efficient".

While outsourcing has been presumed by many commentators to be the preserve of the large corporates this is simply not supported by the empirical evidence. Thus, while in the survey quoted above small UK firms were less likely to outsource over half nevertheless still did so. This finding echoes specific SME research conducted in the US, which found that amongst 596 entrepreneurial companies averaging sales of $100 million, 83% reported at least outsourcing one activity. [87]

1.4 What factors have placed it on most boards' strategic agenda?

Interestingly, as the outsourcing market has developed the locus of decision taking has shifted.

In its IT-centric phase the decision takers were not unsurprisingly drawn from senior IT management. However, as of the late with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in the ascendancy, the decision has shifted to the CEO, the Divisional Director, and the Director of Finance; this despite the fact that the majority of such deals have IT enablement at their core. Gartner graphically makes this point thus:

Cost, of course, and outsourcing's potential to repeatedly reduce it, has undoubtedly been one of the factors that has helped grab executive attention in UK boardrooms. With 10-20% savings in IT Infrastructure costs, 40% through ERP-leveraged BPO, 40-50% through Process Offshoring, and BPO Speed-to-Market savings that are often so large they are off the scale, it is not hard to understand. [88]

While outsourcing may be the talk of the boardroom, still relatively few boards are reaching for the strategic high ground, and embracing the opportunities for transformation and corporate turnaround that some organisations have demonstrably proved exist. There has never been a better time to take this strategic course as the next section explains.

1.5 WHY IT SHOULD VIE FOR FURTHER ATTENTION NOW?

A number of planes of activity and thinking are fusing together just now in a way that creates an explosion of corporate possibilities (shown diagrammatically below).

[89]

Process Vision is one of these planes deriving from a commercial development that has led to new ways of thinking about the organisation. As an analytical tool it has been used to enforce standardisation thus eliminating duplication, and assist in the flattening of hierarchies. Additionally, it has fostered ways of thinking about process control, which has fitted in very nicely with the automation of many business processes through the adoption of computer-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Result: we are now in a position to view our organisations in a radically different manner.

Outsourcing, itself, has undergone significant development, as processes have been refined to reflect best and successful practices in the marketplace. Strategic sourcing approaches have been developed, using flexible contract structures that assist objectives in relationships to converge. Additionally Service Level Agreement management has crafted its own appropriate form of governance, while independent benchmarking organisations have begun to appear offering objective performance comparisons based on both price and quality. Result: outsourcing can be used to define new and stable commercial relationships that were not possible through conventional corporate structures.

Telecoms has undergone a total transformation as the result of technological and commercial shifts that have enormously reduced the cost per piece of information transmitted across the world. Thus, the tremendous bandwidth offered by fibre optics, the convergence of standards for voice and data on the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and the relentless cost-reducing operation of Moore's Law on microchips have in effect shrunk the world. Deregulation has through competition enforced and speeded up the spread of such technologies. Result: the "death of distance" whereby corporates can pick up any business process and place it anywhere else in the world if it is more cost effective or better quality.

Strategy, last but not least, is seen by the NOA as playing an increasingly important role in the adoption and deployment of outsourcing. Porter envisions that in any marketplace suppliers, buyers, new entrants, and substitute purveyors will fight for market share in the competitive arena. Those players that maintain or increase their market share will be those who have found at least a temporarily sustainable competitive advantage. The clear message arising from the marketplace is that players are increasingly creating that competitive advantage through the strategic outsourcing of combinations of business processes. Not only can outsourcing free the cash flow to continue the competitive battle, it can be used to enhance market share, carry the market into new territories, or enable the players to enter completely new arenas. Result: boards will increasingly come to realise that on the chessboard of strategy, business processes are the pawns that should be manoeuvred and swapped in order to create that sustainable competitive advantage ensuring business survival, and that outsourcing is the tool of choice for deployment.

2. OUTSOURCED PROCESSES TO PROVIDE THE BEDROCK FOR REVITALISED, QUALITY ENHANCED, EFFICIENT UK BUSINESS

2.1 Seeing the Business as Processes not Departments

Increasingly, boards are adopting the process view of organisations in order to understand how its information and decision flows interact and how IT can best underpin them.

Figure 1 presents a stylised version of such a top-level business view. Each box represents a business process that by intuitively clicking on the orange arrow (at least in a computer based version of the model) we may drill-down to the supporting processes below.

At this top-level, clearly the board is represented by the top left process driving, as it does, strategy and direction. All the shown processes derive services from the Provide Corporate Support process—bottom right—and as such its links with all the other processes are represented for simplicity by the grey oval.

A moment's reflection will show you that all the processes shown here are typically regarded as the "core" processes which many organisations a decade ago didn't believe they would outsource. This is probably true of all except Optimize Sourcing, which has only gained its recent status by virtue the increasing strategic importance of sourcing decisions, and the subsequent management of relationships.

On further reflection, you will realise that a surprising amount of these "core" processes have already been outsourced.

The contact centres that capture, manage and retain customers are consistently in the media these days in relation to some outsource agreement. Design and development outsourcing has been mentioned as a developing trend above. While in a less overt way, the relatively unknown specialists Solectron and Celestica, demonstrate potential for Supply Chain BPO, by contract manufacturing, shipping, repairing and even designing products for the likes of Cisco, IBM, Nortel, Palm and Compaq.

If we drill-down on Provide Corporate Support by moving to Figure 2, we find the full range of support processes that feature regularly in the press as BPO deals.

In summary, then, thinking in terms of processes, helps us divorce issues from the underlying infrastructure, workforce and departmental hierarchies. It allows the strategist to evaluate, function, interrelationships and quality of supply. It allows the clarity of vision that enables the pursuit of competitive advantage.

2.2 Learning to Buy Services and to Stop Hiring People

The philosophy of buying a quality service rather than recruiting personnel to develop services of unspecified quality, will probably take a while to catch on in corporates as it breaks with a long tradition. Nevertheless, where the supply of such quality services exists in the marketplace that is precisely the trend being established.

Buying a quality benchmarked book-keeping and management accountancy service, for example, makes much more sense than painstakingly recruiting a whole accounting department. Although your accounting policies will inevitably and quite rightly distinguish you from another corporate, the majority of your processes will be common. The advantage of the service procurement route, is the achievement of a scaleable quality result, in significantly less time than the organic recruitment route could possibly offer.

A start-up business today would probably not even consider the organic recruitment route, based on considerations such as time-to-market, service accessibility and guaranteed quality.

2.3 Driving up Efficiency by Eliminating Process Duplication

A feature of most large organisations is the duplication of the same process that occurs as the result of reproduction in different geographic locations, or as the result of historical takeovers and mergers. Whatever the cause, the result is frequently duplication of effort, confusion, and inefficiency.

If you are in any doubt about this conclusion, consider for example the Manage Book-keeping and Management Accounting process. If you drill-down through this you find yourself amongst a group of familiar processes including Manage Cash, Control Receivables, Maintain Ledgers, and Manage Payroll etc. One of these sub-processes Reimburse Expenses is both familiar to us all and very prone to duplication.

None of us would maintain that expense reimbursement was core to the business, that it does not offer significant economies of scale, that it is not ideal for automation once certain volumes are reached (eg consider receipt scanning which can automatically feed the ERP system with source of supply, purchase item, value and VAT), and that upper-quartile service quality will do nothing other than enhance corporate image with its employees. So what other reason than history would lead us to employ many duplicated clerical and accounting staff to do it multifariously, and ineffectively in-house?

Of course, organisations have long recognised this and have started to consolidate their geographic islands of resource in a drive for efficiency. A movement has developed around what are called Shared Service Centres (SSCs), and has become fairly commonplace amongst major corporates, particularly for the HR and accounting functions.

Nevertheless, there are limits to achievable scale that one organisation can possibly hope to exploit. This has led a number of organisations to move to outsourcing as the next step in driving through efficiencies. BT, for example, in justifying its move to BPO, pointed out that while SSC had over a decade helped drive down the number of centres from 64 to five, and employees from 4,200 to 500, it felt it had "exhausted all avenues" and "needed a partner to go further"[90].

2.4 Strengthening Partnering and Relationship Management

The source of most of the failures of outsourcing deals has been in the weakness of both supplier and customer organisations in partnering and managing long-term relationships. Partly this has arisen because procurement has traditionally tended to be adversarial and short-termist, thus tending not to bread the sort of cooperative approach required of successful outsourcing partnerships.

Many of the successful organisations in this field have built up strong sourcing departments with a "centre of excellence" approach, concentrating on building the virtual organisational structures that the new environment has called for. The Optimize Sourcing business process for them has become core.

While this assertion is to some extent observational, it is lent weight by the Manpower Quarterly Survey finding that those doing most outsourcing get best out of it. An organisation that outsources five or more of its business activities will almost certainly have its Optimize Sourcing process model reasonably well refined.

2.5 Excelling in Strategic Vision

To recap, then, boards will increasingly come to realise that on the chessboard of strategy, business processes are the pawns that should be manoeuvred and swapped in order to create sustainable competitive advantages that ensure business survival. Outsourcing is the tool of choice for such strategic deployments, bringing with it inherent cost-effectiveness, service quality enhancements, and duplication eradication.

3. CRAFTING THE RIGHT REGULATORY AND LEGAL ENVIRONMENT

3.1 Why the UK Leads Europe in Business Process Outsourcing

Gartner believes that the UK is both the largest and most mature BPO market in Europe. [91]

This partly stems from the early impetus given to outsourcing overall by government in the UK with Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) in the late 80s, but also from the relatively light regulatory regime in employment which has facilitated its deployment, where in other European countries, local practices and legislation have been inimical to the development of a strong industry.

Nobody expects this lead to last forever, without significant review and revamp of the legislative infrastructure that supports these developments. Nor will it persist without UK businesses rising to the strategic challenge of consistently using the outsourcing tool to reach for competitive advantage.

3.2 Can the UK Environment Avoid the Level of US Social Friction?

The NOA believes that the UK is well positioned, although far from guaranteed to avoid the level of social friction experienced in the US.

Workers in the UK and Europe have far more protection than their American counterparts. In the USA, if a company signs a deal with a supplier to outsource its IT development to India the company is then able to simply sack its staff who are surplus to requirements.

In the UK, the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations (TUPE) means that one company transferring part of its business to another company, must also transfer the contracts of employment of the employees concerned, to the new employer. Either that or the original employer has to offer the employee concerned, similar work within the organisation, or a redundancy package. If this doesn't happen, then the employees concerned have a right to take their employers to court. TUPE is far from perfect, and has proved difficult to enforce, but it is a step in the right direction.

3.3 Ensuring the Right Regulatory and Legal Framework Exist

The NOA believes that the light touch in the Financial Services market has encouraged the UK's world pre-eminence in this field today. It further argues that such an approach would be appropriate in the field of outsourcing too, possibly assisting in the retention of European market leadership and competing effectively with the US corporates.

Trade Associations such as the NOA should be encouraged to develop self-regulating Codes of Practice in respect of the behaviours of both end-user organisations and suppliers. To this end the NOA has already issued consultative documentation on Offshore Positioning and Participant Behaviours, and is working towards a full Code of Practice covering all outsourcing issues.

A review of TUPE is well overdue given the central position it may come to occupy in the UK economy. For example, all employment benefits should receive some sort of automatic protection avoiding the anomalous position of pensions. A review of employment legislation as it applies to redundancy in such outsourcing-related situations, would also prove invaluable. Employees must feel that their rights are protected and that they get a "fair deal" if social friction is to be minimised. Any such review should reflect that objective at its heart.

3.4 Continuing to Lead in Europe and Closing the US Gap

The NOA's suggested policy to continue to lead in Europe and close the gap on the US, consists in summary of a light regulatory environment policed by existing bodies, and legal framework which ensures a "fair deal" for any employee.

4. ENCOURAGING THE GROWTH OF UK PROCESS SPECIALISTS

4.1 Providing an Environment that Nurtures UK-based Process Specialist Businesses

It is hard to be precise about a market that is still developing, but based on Nelson Hall estimates, it seems that the full potential for Business Process Outsourcing Europe-wide will be around £700 billion pa.

Currently, the market represents just over 5% of that figure but growing strongly at 45% per annum. By far the largest segment of the market appears to be Customer Management and Industry-Specific, but with HR and Accounting services providing clearly defined sectors of the market.

Given the potential size of the market, and the potential to grow knowledge-based advanced employment opportunities, it is an area in which the UK Government would probably wish to encourage development.

Strong UK-based Process Specialist Businesses will create employment in the UK, repatriate revenue resulting from offshore outsourcings, as well as winning export earnings by gaining business with non-UK European corporates.

4.2 Creating Employment in the Process Sector

Given the current size of the BPO market in the UK, the NOA estimates that there are some 200,000 knowledge workers employed in this sector already. With this set to double over the next two years, it is an important enough structural change within the UK employment landscape that the government might seek to monitor it through its regular employment surveys; the NOA would be keen to encourage this and assist in any way.

The steps required to create employment in this newly emergent Process Sector, are much the same as outlined in Section 3. The industry neither requires handouts nor tax-breaks, but instead is critically dependent on the social, legal and regulatory framework that is supportive of this trend in business.

Inevitably, as the business grows, training and education will become more important factors, as the skills set and behaviours required to work in these Process Specialist businesses will be unique in some way. However, it is likely that private training companies and tertiary educational establishments will of there own volition spot a gap in the market and set up new courses to meet the need.

Importantly, it will not only be onshore Process Specialists that create employment opportunities, but also those offshore businesses burgeoning in India and China. If they are to do business directly with UK corporates, they will need UK offices and frequently UK staff to market, sell, and relationship manage at the very least; UK process and IT specialists may also be viewed as best suited to serving the UK market.

Altogether, significant job creation is expected to be associated with this sector, which is why the UK Government should seek to encourage it.

4.3 Winning Process Specialist Business Offshore?

That a strong UK Process Specialist sector could win business offshore, or to be more precise in Europe, is hardly controversial. London, has long been a magnate worldwide for the financial services industry, while the contact-centre sector has hosted a considerable amount of European customer management business; doubtless on grounds of technological proficiency but also core linguistic fluency.

The Process Specialist sector is likely to prosper in a similar manner. Many of the SSCs discussed earlier, usually have a number of hubs in Europe and most frequently one within the UK. If, as argued earlier, the global corporates' SSCs ultimately move down the outsourcing route, then strong UK Process Specialists would be exceedingly well placed to pick up the management of the whole European business.

5. IMPLICATIONS FOR GOVERNMENT POLICY

5.1 Seeing Clearly

If anything like the benefits outlined above are to be achieved, the UK Government requires to keep a clear vision of what is happening both in the UK and world economy.

Firstly, there are fundamental structural changes occurring as the result of the sorts of technology enablement discussed above, the maturing of relationship management, and the development and testing of legal frameworks within which successful outsourcings can be pursued. These will result in changes to the employment landscape that are every bit as momentous as those that occurred in the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, the retreat from the land at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the move from manufacturing to services in the 1970s and 1980s. Only enlightened management by government can create an ordered frictionless transition rather than a seismic social disruption that poor handling could result in.

Secondly, the drive for quality and cost savings that moves some employment offshore should be seen in perspective. It will never roll through to the 100% offshore scenario that some scaremongers predict, as reasons of corporate security, resilience and process control will always mitigate against this. Moreover, it is almost certain that the UK economy will benefit from the deployment of these virtual workers, given that the demographics of the last 25 years—low birth rate and longer life—ensures that there is a shortfall in the "employment resource pool" that will need bridging in some way if economic welfare—as measured by gdp per capita—is to be preserved and enhanced. [92]Furthermore, the competitive advantage of offshore destinations will not last indefinitely as resultant gdp growth narrows the salary differentials.

Finally, such offshore destinations will themselves become prime markets for UK Business in there own right by the middle of this century; the Economist has recently pointed out that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China,) will—on current trends—surpass the G7 group in terms of raw GDP[93] and thus come to represent a prime market for UK business. As such, these markets require cultivation, rather than the alienation that precipitate offshore legislation might provoke. The politics of enlightened self-interest suggest building strong relationships with such potential market partners, in many cases on the basis of a good historical foundation.

5.2 Continuous Learning and Re-Skilling

The UK Government has already committed itself to the goal of continuous learning and re-skilling in order to adapt to the coming knowledge economy. [94]It is hoped that through propounding of this White Paper, a clearer perspective of what some of this knowledge economy might look like has been developed.

Clearly knowledge skills will be core to what the Process Specialists will require, and it has been argued that both commercial and state education will start to provide the sorts of courses that fill, for example, the "relationship management" vacuum.

The NOA merely calls for a re-commitment to this cause here.

5.3 Re-Deploying

State assistance with re-deployment to the thriving economic sectors in the economy is again going to be essential if some of the strategic visions of this paper are to be achievable.

A government commitment to tracking the developing Process Specialists in their employment requirements is required here to ensure that appropriate resource is rapidly and smoothly re-deployed, to feed the industry's growth. Additionally, other fast-track sectors need identifying and tracking in order to facilitate appropriate re-deployment.

The understanding and the interlinking of these evolving trends is key. It is not at all fanciful, for example, to contend that the sort of employee being displaced form contact-centres by offshore initiatives, is precisely the sort of employee that Process Specialists will wish to employ.

5.4 Legislative Rights Protection and Self-regulation

The NOA's preferred recipe for UK success here, is for the creation of a light regulatory environment policed by existing bodies, and revamped legal framework which ensures a "fair deal" for any employee.

6. REVIEWING THE BENEFITS

6.1 Economic Benefits

The NOA has argued that outsourcing can be an important stimulus to economic growth in the UK. The development of a whole new industry itself is important, but that very industry's devotion to keeping the strategic advantage in UK corporates' court will create even greater benefits right across the business spectrum.

While some corporates may seek to make short-term gains through outsourcings, in a competitive world such excessive profits are short lived and soon trimmed to the acceptable. The resultant reduction in prices that such trimmings bring, should stimulate European market volumes, while at the same time help UK corporates grab a larger share of them, thus creating new jobs in the process.

Additionally, the NOA has become aware of a trend in which wholesale outsourcings have occurred in order to successfully achieve a business turnaround. This may have a significant impact in protecting jobs in the UK too. It can be argued that without the outsourcing such companies would become insolvent and all jobs lost. Not only that, but such insolvency may well have toppled their suppliers into insolvent positions, causing the UK economy to shed yet further jobs.

Such multiplier effects—on the one hand a virtuous circle creating many new jobs and on the other a downward spiral of domino-like business collapse and redundancy—are commonplace in the field of economic phenomena. In is interesting that McKinsey[95]—basing its research on similar considerations—has recently asserted that $1.45 of global economic value is created for every dollar of labour cost outsourced offshore. $1.12 of this gain accrues to the US; in other words a net gain for the economy and employment overall.

6.2 Gains for Government, Employer and Employee

Through the support of the NOA's initiative, the Government gains a thriving information worker based industry, financially strong blue chip corporates, healthy economic growth, and a blueprint for the revitalisation of its own organisation.

Employers gain diversely sourced skills in what will increasingly be a skill-tight market, and the opportunity to revitalise their businesses and re-shape their processes to gain the commercial initiative time and time again.

The employee will at all times be treated fairly and respectfully, and be re-skilled and re-deployed should the need arise. Moreover, the employees chances of employment will immeasurably be increased given the realisation of the economic scenario painted above.

The NOA itself gains by assisting the Government in whatever way is requested of it to help achieve this vision.

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