Genpact is a large, multinational provider of business process and IT solutions across the world. It has maintained a rich history in Mexico for more than two decades, and decided to put its Latin American headquarters in Juárez in 2006. The goal of the expansion was to help Genpact establish an even stronger base in the country and facilitate further growth throughout the region.

Cesar Lozano, a Juárez native knows both the city and the company very well. He has been connected with its operations for 26 years, starting out with the arm that was tied to GE back before Genpact was even officially founded in the 1990s. Today, he is the company’s vertical leader for Latin American operations — in Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala — and oversees infrastructure manufactured service, IT management services, high-tech operations, and re-engineering.

Given his background, few know the market as well as Lozano. To learn some of this insights, we recently sat down with the industry veteran to hear more about Genpact’s work in the nation’s IT sector and his hometown.

Cesar Lozano of Genpact says that his employees in Juárez “don’t only understand the language — they understand the U.S. culture.”

Mexico IT: How would you describe Genpact’s presence in the BPO and IT services sectors in Mexico?

Cesar Lozano: We have been in the BPO industry for awhile, but in Mexico we started working in IT managed services about two years ago. That was not part of our main scope for LatAm previously. But now we have a couple of external customers, plus we manage all the internal help desks from Latin America and the U.S. here in Juárez. I have around 40 people here right now working on ITMS operations.

Mexico IT: What about Juárez makes it really suited for that type of business?

Cesar Lozano: Part of the reason why we are here in Juárez is because all of our people are bilingual. And they don’t only understand the language — they understand the U.S. culture. Some of them used to live in the United States and now they have come back. So it is very easy for them to connect with the customers, and that makes us more competitive.

Just to give you some perception of the city, we celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving. We watch the Super Bowl. We are on the border, so most of us either have family in the U.S. or live there and have family in Juárez. Many people from Juárez attended school in El Paso. Or people work there and live here or vice versa. We say it’s one single community. People go on weekends or some people go on a daily basis. We have the advantage of the express line, so you don’t have to wait in the queue at the bridge. In less than five minutes, you are across the border. That’s another advantage we have here.

Mexico IT: With the large metro area on both sides of the border, does that give you a large talent pool to draw from? What are the other advantages of this proximity to Texas?

Cesar Lozano: It’s easy for us to find all the appropriate resources here in Juárez. There are good universities in Juárez that offer education in these fields, so we don’t have any issue finding the right people with the skills we are looking for.

It’s also easy to go to customer sites — same-day trips — so that is another big reason we decided to operate from Juárez. And we have an internal team here that is looking for IT operations. We have some business that requires software development, so we have our internal developers — a group in charge of networks and IT responsibilities from other customers — here as well. All of them are local developers, and some of them have been with us for 10-plus years.

That’s an advantage that we have. When we need people, the market is very open and we have a lot of applicants with the appropriate skills and profile coming in for an interview. So finding workers is not a problem for us. It has never been a problem for us.

Mexico IT: In the United States media, the city often gets a bad reputation. Do these concerns ever affect operations or business?

Cesar Lozano: A few years ago, that was a factor. We had customers, not only ours, but some investors, moving their processes out of Juárez because they either didn’t want to come to oversee the operations or have meetings face to face. But the reality is that the situation in Juárez is now totally different. We don’t have any of the issues that we had four years ago, and now the perception is changing, too.

Next week, we have a meeting, an annual meeting with one of our biggest customers, and all the senior managers are coming to Juárez and staying in Juárez. They know the reality, and they feel completely comfortable because they understand how it really is. In the last month, all the hotels in the city have been reporting that they are 80% or 90% full. Even at the restaurants, you see there are waiting lines. Those are all good signs that the city is recovering in perception.

Mexico IT: What is next for Genpact, not just in Juárez but in the whole country? Are there plans to expand in Mexico?

Cesar Lozano: Right now, we have potential in another state in Mexico. I can say it would be more than 400 people working in IT. I can’t say exactly where, but, yes, we are exploring opportunities to increase the workforce on IT-related operations.

We are working very hard on the “lean digital” initiative, so most of our people are lean trained. We are hiring more people in analytics as well. So that’s pretty much the future. We see a big, big opportunity if we move into automatic solutions, digital solutions and have people working on quick implementation while developing some macros and taking advantage of some existing tools in the market. So that’s what we’re looking for as we increase the workforce with skills in IT because that’s what we’re offering our customers.

(Photo: Matthew Townsend)