JAMAICA remains one the most attractive destinations for business process outsourcing (BPO) but the country must focus on improving its competitiveness in a heated industry with low barriers to entry, warns the head of Xerox Corporation.

Ursula Burns, who took over the helms of Xerox in 2009, remains focused on diversifying the American multinational into services from the printing and copying business. A major part of this strategy is BPO, Xerox’s fastest-growing market.

Jamaica is Xerox’s third largest BPO site outside of the US, behind only India and the Phillippines, with 5,595 workers employed across seven locations on the island — five in Montego Bay and one each in Portmore and Kingston. The company does customer care for mostly US clients, including the telecommunications, health care and technology industries.

“The potential of BPO is very high. Jamaica has the following benefits: it’s a service economy, it has a fairly educated portion of the population that we can draw from and it’s culturally an operation that works hard,” Burns told journalists during her visit with staff at Xerox’s facilities in Montego Bay.

Jamaica is keen to capitalise on its emergence as a major destination for providing outsourcing service to North American companies, as part of Government’s plan to double the nation’s 11,000 information and communication technology (ICT) jobs in three years. But Burns said the island would find it hard to attract — and indeed, maintain — investments if it doesn’t continually improve its ICT business environment, including infrastructure and education, as other nations jostle for a position in the market.

“What Jamaica, and every BPO site, has to understand is that unlike a technology business where the barriers to entry are generally large, BPO’s initial barriers to entry can be low and it’s really important therefore that the people who have footprints today continue to reinvent themselves,” Burns advised.

“It’s really important that Jamaica continues to focus on the fact that they have a good base in this service type area and that base will continue to be attacked by competitors so they have to keep making it better,” she added.

BPO industry leaders in Jamaica say the country urgently needs more space to accommodate call centre seats and a better training model to accelerate ICT activity. US outsourcing giant Convergys Corporation recently announced that it has delayed plans to open a call centre in Jamaica, with sources claiming that it was due to concerns over the availability of work space on the island.

For Xerox, expansion in Jamaica revolves around the firm’s plan to get more businesses in similar BPO accounts already handled in the country. While space is important, Burns said it’s not a concern for the company’s operations here at the moment.

“We will continue to expand here or contract here, but expand here hopefully if the business continues to grow,” said Burns.

“As we continue to expand, yes we would have to find more space but I don’t want anybody to believe that we are limited by space. If we continue to grow in either customer or expanded line of business, we will find space,” she said.

The biggest challenge for Xerox as it looks to expand globally is the world economy, said Burns.

“There is not a place in the world that is not unsettled now economically,” noted the Xerox chair and CEO. “That’s just a business challenge that we have to deal with.”

She identified the so-called US “fiscal cliff”, which would result in huge tax increases and spending cuts on January 1, with the force to throw the US economy into recession, as a major concern for the world economy right now — although she believes a deal will be reached to prevent that from happening.

“In terms of global business, it would be an extremely detrimental event. The one thing the fiscal cliff has done that is clear to business leaders is that it creates a massive amount of uncertainty and one thing that is dertrimental to any kind of stability in the economy is uncertainty,” said Burns, who was one of several high-profile CEOs in the US to meet with President Barack Obama about the fiscal cliff a few weeks ago.

Xerox is a Fortune 500 company — the top 500 US companies, according to Fortune magazine — with revenues totalling more than US$22 billion in 2011. Services now account for 52 per cent of the firm’s revenues.

In September 2009, it acquired Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for US$6.4 billion in cash and stock. The aim was to combine Xerox’s copiers, printers and document management services with the BPO expertise of Dallas, Texas-based ACS, as part of its broad diversification strategy. ACS was already one of the largest ICT service providers in Jamaica and a few months earlier had acquired indigenous outsourcing firm e-Services Group, founded by Patrick Casserly, for US$85 million.

Burns said the acquisition of ACS has worked “amazingly well”, with Xerox leveraging its brand recognition with ACS’s credibility in BPO and informational technology outsourcing.

The daughter of Panamanian immigrants, Burns is the first African-American woman to head a Fortune 500 company.