A month after telling its Wilsonville workforce that it may outsource some engineering work to an Indian firm, Xerox Corp.bizWatch Xerox Corp. Follow this company this week said the plan is going forward — without layoffs.

And the 120 Wilsonville workers affected won’t even have to change desks.

Bill McKee, a spokesman for Norwalk, Conn.-based Xerox (NYSE: XRX) said the company has signed a five-year product engineering services agreement with HCL TechnologiesbizWatch HCL Technologies Follow this company in a move that affects 600 employees across five Xerox locations worldwide.

But rather than laying off employees, McKee said the 600 employees — including 120 in Wilsonville — will be offered the chance to work for HCL “in the same desk and building they currently work at.”

In the next few weeks, those employees will receive offer letters from HCL with pay and benefits comparable to what they get at Xerox, McKee said.

Should they choose not to change employers, McKee said selected employees will be offered a voluntary leave package that includes separation benefits.

“We expect a small number of employees will accept it,” he said.

Xerox employs 3,500 in Oregon, including 1,500 in Wilsonville, home to Xerox’s primary research and development center for solid ink technology.

HCL, a $5.8 billion global technology and IT services company, will now handle certain aspects of Xerox’s mechanical, electrical and software engineering work for its printing and imaging product lines.

McKee said the partnership will allow Xerox to benefit from HCL’s scale, as well as its engineering experience in platform development, infrastructure and quality assurance work.

HCL, McKee said, benefits by strengthening its presence in the U.S. and United Kingdom, a key part of the company’s strategy of expanding its engineering services to more clients globally.

Source:http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2011/06/21/xerox-outsourcing-wilsonville-jobs.html

Timothy James & Partners has outsourced investment, according to clients’ needs, since it was founded in 1995.

‘We have always outsourced when we feel a client requires a specific part of their overall portfolio to be managed on a discretionary basis and with a particular requirement in mind, such as income for school fees. Alternatively, they might require a specific portfolio of institutional structured products we do not have access to, or perhaps a portfolio of fixed-interest securities,’ said Ian Hart, director at Timothy James.
Relationship-driven

The firm outsourced to Quilter for nine years, before following consultant Andrew Denham-Davis when he moved to Brooks Macdonald Asset Management in 2004. ‘We are driven by relationships with people, and so followed Denham-Davis to Brooks as we have a good relationship with him. He is a hell of a character and very dynamic, with excellent organisational skills,’ said Hart.

Hart said Brooks’ unique selling point was its ability to run individual portfolios for clients.

‘We hate firms that claim to be individual portfolio managers, only to find out half of its clients have the same portfolio. It runs two or three models and just slots your clients into one of these. It says it is bespoke, but it is not,’ he said.

Hart said: ‘We like the fact that Brooks does not just put together portfolios of UK equities and bonds, which is all a lot of firms do. It also looks at the whole international picture, as well as structured products and all sorts of funds we cannot get close to. Brooks is very good at what it does.’

Source:http://www.citywire.co.uk/new-model-adviser/outsourcing-investment-why-timothy-james-and-partners-uses-brooks-macdonald/a501368?ref=new-model-adviser-features-list

When our Internet connection stopped working last week, my wife called customer care of our local service provider in the East Bay Area of Oakland.

The company sent over a technician within an hour of the complaint and he fixed our problem. However, over the weekend, we saw that our Internet connection was not working again.

Our next call to the company was routed through to a call centre in India and after that, our morning began to go downhill pretty fast.

The person on the other side had a general idea of where we were calling from, though her responses were programmed and chillingly reflexive. She could have been part of a late 19th century physiological experiment, where subjects were conditioned to provide reflexes to certain stimuli.

Only, in her case, she provided apologies, useless drivel and annoying “on hold” music that stretched on for close to twenty minutes.

There have been legendary commentaries, some of it outright racist, about consumers in the west having to deal with customer care providers who are based in South Asia. While some commentators highlight the caricaturised nature of the encounter, others seek to see it as the symbolic economic ascendance of once developing countries like India.

The essence of this encounter is something called Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), which has become synonymous with Indian cities like Bangalore, in contemporary public culture.

It involves the breaking down of a production process into neat, clearly defined lines. These lines are based both on competencies and activities that are almost like the front and back of a hotel. The front involves face-to-face interaction with customers, while the back is where a range of activities ranging from laundry, cooking and cleaning are organised.

In the real world, this involves taking certain kinds of work offshore to countries like India, because big companies find it easier to cut down their expenses in the countries where they work.

While this creates adverse local conditions, many companies like to fob off criticism by stating that they have created huge employment benefits in other countries.

This is not true. In countries like India, they employ less than 1% of the population and do not create any forward and backward linkages in the economy. These companies could well shift to some other country where there is a favourable climate. This is the crux of the problem with outsourcing production. It is fundamentally unfriendly to labour rights and preys on legal regimes that allow corporations to dodge their social responsibility.

It is a classic case of reducing the production process to mutually autonomous and disengaged lines of work, where the workers are absolutely divorced from the product of their labour.

It is no coincidence that those who work in BPO units in India do not have rights to organise.

This may not be the popular perception of the BPO industry and outsourcing process in our region, since some of our youth have found gainful employment in call centres across India. Yet, one has to step up to ask several questions about the kind of relations that outsourcing fosters among our peoples:

Does it lead to any form of empowerment for local communities? Does it encourage equality and value of labour? Does it make our societies more questioning and enlightened? Does it challenge political marginalisation? I am afraid that all the answers to these questions will be “no”.

This phenomenon only represents the rapaciousness of capitalist globalisation and in no way should it be encouraged at the expense of the material and political empowerment of local communities, be these communities situated in Oakland or Dimapur.

Source:http://www.morungexpress.com/editorial/67198.html