IBM Philippines tapped for Sara Lee's back office operations

MANILA, Philippines - IBM Philippines will beef up its business in the country after its Manila-based global delivery center was chosen as one of the locations to provide the finance and accounting services for Sara Lee Corp.'s global back office operations. In a statement issued on Wednesday, IBM Philippines General Manager James Velasquez said the agreement is expected to boost the finance and accounting services of the global delivery center, whose multilingual workforce provides services in German, French, and Spanish aside from English and local dialects. Last December, IBM agreed to run some of Sara Lee’s transaction processing in North America and Europe aside from applications development and maintenance and global indirect procurement activities for seven years. “Sara Lee's move to globally integrated, back office shared services will be accelerated with this business transformation collaboration. This pact allows us to further grow our local finance and accounting business process services, and at the same time kick off our new supply chain management services locally," IBM Philippines Country General Manager James Velasquez said. Sara Lee is well known through its food, beverage, household and body care brands, including Ambi Pur, BallPark, Douwe Egberts, Hillshire Farm, Jimmy Dean, Kiwi, Sanex, Sara Lee, and Senseo. These brands generate more than $13 billion in annual net sales covering approximately 200 countries. The company has 44,000 employees worldwide. “A key point is that our Manila Center is building capabilities to deliver services not only in English, but in European languages as well. The availability of a wide range of multilingual talents in the Philippines serves as a competitive advantage for the country in which IBM will continue to leverage and work on further strengthening," adds Cassandra Soto, Manila Delivery Center Lead. The IBM statement said the transfer of activities would happen in a "phased approach in accordance with local consultation requirements" as Sara Lee "is simplifying its organization to achieve efficiencies through process discipline, functional centers of excellence, integrated supply chains and outsourcing work where appropriate." - Ruby Anne M. Rubio, GMANews.TV