Daniel Mereuta, Optima: Doing business in the outsourcing industry will become more difficult
Optima reached a turnover of five million Euro in 2019, according to its CEO, who says that “2019 was a good year for us, another year of continuous growth.”
“This year is a special year for us since we are going to celebrate 10 years from the inception,” Daniel Mereuta told Outsourcing Today. “The goal remains the same, we want to continue to develop in a sustainable way and I am emphasizing on the word ‘sustainable’, because we have never followed growth or expansion just for the sake of it, we want reliability and sustainability.”
Mereuta says that, for the outsourcing industry, business will become more difficult: “The main reason, is of course, the talent availability. Not having all the studies at hand, I am very confident to state that Romania is most probable one of the countries with the largest talent shortage at least at CEE level. So, the competition I would say is more on attracting talent rather than cost/pricing.”
Optima is a medium, independent BPO but with a good spread of delivery centres in the country, according to its CEO. “Although we don’t have a very large size of operations, we do have 4 delivery centres in 3 cities and this gives us some more flexibility and better possibilities to attract new colleagues. It was perceived as strange that we have opened our office outside Bucharest when we were around 150-200 people, because usually companies are considering other options when they are exhausting the first city that they are in. But now, for us, this regional expansion is paying off. I think also a strong point for us is the size which brings us much more dynamism and speed of action, so much required these days. Of course, we are also working to keep up the pace and tackle many trends like automation, digital marketing etc. not only to improve internal efficiency but also as new services offered to our clients,” Mereuta explains.
Automation is one key trend that Optima is actively pursuing: “We have already deployed bots in the company, we have developed also an internal practice and we are striving to learn and to develop in this area. Data analytics is also something that we are working on it but my view on tech in general is that we have to put more effort into learning and understating how can we use the technologies for our purposes, so finding them the right fit and use, rather than creating purposes for the technologies.”
Read the full interview in the printed edition of Outsourcing Today to be issued on the market in May this year!