Apparently a Sapporo based company, Digital Technologies Corp, has developed a software that can analyse the mood of callers phoning into call centres. According to a report on Nikkei.net, the software can establish whether the person on the other side of the line is sober, slightly outraged, or simply barking mad It bases its analysis on biometrics and divides the results into whether a caller is happy or displeased, on a scale of one to seven. The report doesn’t relate whether if things go to the top end of the scale, whether the call centre will put them on hold indefinitely and refuse to engage with them any more on human rights grounds, or assign them to an anger management course. (Sponsored by the Call Centre of course) Lets look at this from a broader application, and first up.. could it be scaled up to avert those occasional domestic ‘disagreements’ caused when our wife or girlfriends claim that men are empathy black holes when trying to gauge their all to frequent mood swings...?

Outsourcing Mentor has just released a new free application that can assist in the vendor selection process. This application poses a series of questions in 4 main pillars of vendor selection.

· Quality – How much does quality matter when thinking about outsourcing

· Risk – Does managing risk play a large part in choosing a vendor

· Strategy – Is your decision to outsource a strategic one within your organisation

· Cost – How important is cost when choosing an outsource vendor

After the application is downloaded and installed it walks you through the questions and produces a relationship chart. This can then be used to weigh the relative importance of these 4 pillars and provide input in your choice of a category of vendors.

There are many thousands of vendors based all over the world who are interested in your business. Identifying some key objectives can help you narrow the list down to a more manageable section of the vendor community. This can be used to produce the initial list of vendors before you move into generating the short list.

To get the free application, click this link

Outsource & Offshore with Ollie & Sam is Copyright © 2007 CTQ Media and Bob D’Amico - All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Request permission.

Outsource & Offshore with Ollie & Sam is Copyright © 2007 CTQ Media and Bob D’Amico - All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Request permission.

A bit of good news! Sourcingmag.com author Brad Rubin and his family have just welcomed a new addition to their clan:

Zachary Casey Rubin, born March 1. Congratulations to all!