The growth of the global business process outsourcing market has been a steady trend in the global economy for several years. All analyses show that this trend will also continue in the coming years. Many providers of these modern business services have found that Poland is a good place to locate centers of this type of services. Our main advantages include a good location in the center of Europe, services with very good value for money, and membership in the European Union, which guarantees stable legislation and freedom of travel. Another advantage is a good level of education, as well as a large number of well-educated employees who speak foreign languages.
Currently, there are already more than 400,000 people working in business service centers in Poland, which accounts for more than 6% of total employment in the business sector. These are both independent entities specializing in this type of services, as well as dedicated branches of large international corporations providing services in our country, e.g. accounting, HR management support or IT services to meet the internal needs of the group.
The range of services is very wide, however most of them are all kinds of IT services. Over 40% of business service centers (serving both external and internal customers) are specialized in IT services. Another large group combines IT support with other services, e.g. financial and accounting ones.
The spectrum of IT services is very wide. It is both application support and development of business processes as well as project management, information security, administration and management of systems and infrastructure, tests and cloud services.
One of the technology solutions most often used in business service centers in Poland is SAP (more than 80%). It is mainly used by shared services centers of large corporations, most often specializing in accounting processes, invoicing or supporting other business areas. In addition, several large companies have their own IT/SAP competence centers in Poland. They are responsible for the development and maintenance of the transaction system for some branches or the entire organization.
IT staffing
Based on the above data, it is easy to imagine that people with knowledge of SAP at both application and ABAP/Java programming as well as administration levels are a large army among employees of business services centers in Poland.
However, even in organizations that have their own IT/SAP competence centers, one of the biggest challenges is to provide resources – an appropriate number of consultants with specific competences and experience levels. Many of these organizations are practically constantly looking for people who could join the core team either for the time of increased demand for specialists from selected areas or for the implementation of separate projects.
In many IT teams, it has been a proven practice for years to provide additional support for SAP competences through the body leasing service (IT staffing). This is a long-term “rental" of an employee from a specialized entity. Based on the contract, the partner’s employees become members of the customer’s team and carry out the assigned tasks. Work can be carried out at the customer’s premises or remotely. The latter form has gained popularity in recent years due to the removal of geographical restrictions – Poland is a large country – and lower logistics costs.
The advantage of body leasing is that you retain control over the outsourced tasks and embed in your own team a specialist who can share their experience and knowledge. The lending company bears the costs related to the hiring and development of the employee. Cooperation in this model ensures that the copyrights are retained by the customer.
All for One Poland has been providing SAP body leasing services for over a dozen years. Our largest customers include Poland-based SAP competence centers of several global corporations. We support them in development and transformation projects. Depending on the organization and the nature of the work, All for One consultants play different roles in them, performing ABAP programming work, building interfaces, developing standard system functionalities, designing and executing tasks in business transformation projects, and even managing selected projects.
By offering our customers body leasing solutions, we focus on the security of long-term cooperation and building stable business relationships based on trust. It is worth noting that as an organization with extensive project experience, we can provide the customer with outsourced support also in other areas of SAP technology or IT system security, thus complementing the support provided by the leased specialist.
There is always something to do in large SAP systems. Global projects are by definition planned for many months, sometimes several years, and often work is carried out in parallel for branches in different countries. Team members can be absent for a long time and it is convenient to be able to guarantee a competent replacement for them. This kind of cooperation is usually of a long-term nature.
IT/SAP specialists are exclusively available to the customer for several months or longer.
Our customers appreciate All for One’s flexibility and readiness to provide a consultant in the chosen area at short notice. In the long term, cooperation evolves and expands into new areas. The demand for the number and type of competences changes, as does the organization and system management model at the customer’s company.
Sales Team Manager, All for One Poland
Usual and unusual needs
Anyone who manages a team of IT/SAP specialists certainly struggles with the problem of lack of employees and competences. These problems also affect specialized shared service centers working for multiple group entities. In such organizations there is practically always some development work and projects going on, often more than one at the same time. In such cases, in-house teams are no longer sufficient and it is necessary to hire additional specialists. A good solution is short- or long-term employee leasing, i.e. hiring employees with specific competencies.
In our experience, SSCs reach for external support when they have unusual needs, e.g. they are looking for specific and rare competencies for a specific project, or when there are typical needs, but on an unusual scale for the organization, e.g. during the implementation of a large project. Staff shortages related to employee turnover or long-term absences are also a frequent situation.
All for One Poland cooperates with several organizations specializing in IT/SAP administration and development for multinational corporations, providing SAP specialists to support the customer’s internal teams. Customers appreciate this model of acquiring competencies, as it allows them to improve operational and financial efficiency.
Jakub Szwejkowski, Sales Team Manager, All for One Poland
An example of successful cooperation
All for One’s customers using SAP/IT staffing services include competence centers of a globally operating packaging manufacturer and a media corporation located in Poland.
Body leasing services that we provide for the IT/SAP competence center of a global corporation from the FMCG industry are another example of successful cooperation. The beginning of this cooperation dates back to 2007. Initially, we supported the customer in SAP technological areas, performing integration work in SAP Process Integration (Process Orchestration). Competence and experience in NetWeaver integration technologies have always been our strengths, and building and maintaining interfaces is one of the most important items on the list of SAP maintenance and development tasks.
In the subsequent years, we supported the customer in the development of the SAP BW data warehouse. We also participated in a large project to create and develop an internal customer service center based on the SAP CRM system – EIC (Employee Interaction Center). We took part in the SAP CRM upgrade.
Another large area of cooperation was human capital management as well as the development of the SAP HCM corporate platform and SuccessFactors. For several years, we worked with the customer in the project of launching and then developing the so-called soft functions.
Currently, All for One Poland consultants are participating in a large SAP development project in the area of logistics (sales and distribution modules as well as materials management). The goal is to build a corporate solution for end-to-end tracking of products at every stage of their lifecycle.
Long-term cooperation, good reputation and trust we have gained over the years have resulted in extending the scope of tasks outsourced to us beyond SAP solutions.
By leveraging the potential of cloud services and industrial automation, the customer’s factories are transforming to the concept of Industry 4.0. All for One Poland provides a team of DevOps consultants and cloud technology specialists implementing a project in the field of the Industrial Internet of Things and supporting the customer with AWS competences in order to maintain and continuously develop a business-critical IT environment in the public cloud.
In addition, one of our information security specialists works on a project to implement and improve a management system in aspects related to information security, supporting managers of IT, production, design and HR departments.
In all these areas, cooperation was long-lasting. The work was carried out in various models. Some of it was typical body leasing when our consultants became part of the customer’s project teams and performed the assigned tasks. Another common model involved separate projects or sub-projects within larger development programs, or separate scopes of work for which we were fully responsible. Work is carried out for various companies of the group around the world.