Posts Tagged ‘Outsource’

Age of austerity set to boost contract work for Mouchel as local authorities seek to outsource

September 2nd, 2010

OUTSOURCING firm Mouchel said yesterday the outlook for its businesses was improving as the UK government starts to farm out work to cut costs.
“The medium and longer term outlook is becoming increasingly positive as the new government’s policies are implemented,” the company said in a statement.
Many support services firms could suffer as the coalition government cuts spending to fight a ballooning national deficit but Mouchel is confident it will gain as local authorities seek to create efficiencies.
Mouchel, which maintains Britain’s highways, said it had won new work in Australia and Abu Dhabi and that it expects to save £25m of costs in the full-year.
The company also said it had appointed David Tilston as finance director, replacing
Kevin Young.

Source:-http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/age-austerity-set-boost-contract-work-mouchel-local-authorities-seek-outsource

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

Now, KPO workers at increased risk of AIDS

September 2nd, 2010

MANGALORE: Exit lorry drivers, and construction and manual labourers, enter Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) workers in to the world of AIDS! May sound strange, but a recent survey carried out by Population Services International (PSI), a NGO involved in action against HIV/AIDS, has categorised KPO workers as the next major sector that would contribute to higher prevalence of reported AIDS case in Karnataka.

Quoting this PSI survey report, Gurudas M Bhat, additional Labour Commissioner at the inaugural function of Hassan regional level dissemination workshop of National policy on HIV/AIDS and World of Work here on Tuesday, said KPO workers seem to be more vulnerable to contract AIDS as much as lorry drivers, and labourers were until the recent past. The latter category compared to the former seems to be more aware of AIDS, he said.

Observing that most of the workers in KPO sector, including IT and ITES, BPO and call centres were youths, and staying alone, he said it is natural that they might try to fulfil their biological needs without paying heed to the consequences. Sustained awareness campaign conducted for lorry drivers, and construction workers is bearing fruits and most of them overcoming inhibitions prefer to go in for protected sexual intercourse, he noted.

The survey only confirms that stereotypes of categories of people who were hitherto considered to be high risk group no longer is true and that prevalence of AIDS is seen across categories of people be it KPO workers, bank employees and so on. “AIDS has broken class barriers and every section of population could find themselves vulnerable unless they are careful with their sexual indulgence and take precautions,” he said.

The spread of AIDS is having a bearing on gross domestic product that is taking a hit of one per cent because of people infected by the disease, he said. The disease is difficult to detect and Supreme Court guidelines also makes it amply clear that no potential employer can screen a target employee for the disease as it invades of the personal liberties of the individuals concerned. This underscores the need for individual integrity, he noted.

G S Gopal, manager, Systems Strengthening, PSI Connect later told TOI that a ‘Most at Risk’ survey carried out by PSI that covered all sectors of work force found that certain sectors were now in high risk category. These included sugarcane workers in Bagalkot and Belgaum districts, garment workers in Bangalore, mines workers in Bellary, and construction workers and fishermen in coastal Karnataka, especially Mangalore.

Source:-http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mangalore/Now-KPO-workers-at-increased-risk-of-AIDS-Survey/articleshow/6476540.cms

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

To outsource or not outsource…that is the question

August 31st, 2010

Some companies are rethinking their global product strategies. The article mentions the rising costs in China, the threat to intellectual property and the need for more flexibility.

In my experience working with US companies, this is not yet a trend. Companies outsource for a number of reasons. For some, manufacturing is not their core competency. They want to focus on product development, sales and marketing and not manufacturing.

Others certainly outsource to reduce cost. Unless their workforce is willing to take a pay decrease, like GE employees did in Louisville, KY, companies have more of an advantage by outsourcing.

The savings allows U.S. companies to stay afloat and expand in a highly competitive global market. There are many debates about outsourcing currently due to the high unemployment rates in the US. Some will argue that steps need to be put in place to incent companies to keep jobs in the US while many economists argue that outsourcing increases wealth in the economy and more measures need to be put into place to educate and insure unemployed workers when looking for new employment.

Outsourcing does become a commitment. There will always be times when the outsourcing company wants to bring work back from their partner. This is especially true when there is still some level of manufacturing within the outsourcing company. They are sensitive to capacity utilization and capital investment and it is natural to want to maintain a steady rate within their own facility.

This however does not represent the mature outsourcing model.

Companies that have been outsourcing for years have a valued partnership with their contract manufacturer. (By the way, I hear so many terms for this! Contract Manufacturer, CM, EMS, TPM, CMO !! It would be nice to standardize! ). These companies provide their partner with a steady flow of work, keeping costs down for their CM.

Key to the relationship between the outsourcing company (let’s call them the OEM) and the CM is the ‘open book’. This means sharing information with the end goal being a win/win relationship.

Information used to be very protected years ago. Now, there is an emergence of trust. I think this is largely due to technology and the software available now to easily share data and collaborate between systems.

The high tech OEMs have been outsourcing for a number of years and with good success. The life sciences OEMs are entering this business model a little later but at increasing levels.

There is a significant amount of complexity in the life sciences industry with regulatory adherence and inventory expiry but with the right processes and software they can also be very successful.

Source:http://blog.kinaxis.com/2010/08/to-outsource-or-not-outsource-that-is-the-question/

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

Outsource to the Boss

August 30th, 2010

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

When, why and where you should outsource

August 27th, 2010

Fact: Your business will not thrive if you’re spending all your time doing tasks that don’t help it grow. Performing jobs that aren’t your core function is clearly not the best use of your time. But these tasks need to be done. So what’s the solution? Outsourcing.

If you’re thinking of outsourcing in order to free up your time, to save you money or even to simply put the task in the hands of a professional, there are a few things for you to consider if you’re going to make the most out of outsourcing.

“Outsourcing allows your team to become much more proficient and get training and get progression through an organisation,” says Mike Gedye, Senior Director for CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) Global Corporate Services.

WHERE TO BEGIN

“The starting point would be to know what you’ve set out to achieve through the outsourcing process,” says Gedye. “Define what success looks like to you.

Too many people set out in the outsourcing process not really knowing what they what to achieve.

Sometimes that is cost saving or focussed around organisational chain or sometimes it’s around change of service levels.

The ones that fail their objectives often really haven’t defined what they want to achieve from the outsourcing process.”

CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) Global Corporate Services team has a global outsourcing advisory business.

It provides integrated real estate outsourcing solutions on a contractual basis to multinational corporations, the healthcare industry, and the public sector worldwide.

“If you want to focus an outsource that drives savings then you need to know what you’re paying today, which sounds pretty obvious but you’d be surprised by how many people don’t have a handle on their portfolio,” says Gedye.

“I think the supply chain is able to provide a more specialist capability than an in-source solution.

In source teams tend to be quite generous in their capabilities, whereas if you take it up to the supply chain who are much more dedicated specialists in different areas who can be brought into your portfolio.”

KNOWING WHAT NOT TO OUTSOURCE

Deciding what to outsource should be a little more strategic than just outsourcing everything you possibly can.

There are certain rules and procedures that will help you decide what to outsource and to not to outsource.

“The received wisdom is not to outsource a problem,” explains Michael Sinclair, head of outsourcing at law firm, Simmons and Simmons. “This is a mantra in the industry.

So if you have a problem which you can’t sort out yourself, outsourcing it is generally not going to fix the problem. So normally what we recommend is that you get your house in order.

You make sure that it’s working internally, so you can show the supplier how you benefit internally, how are they going to improve on that?”

Sinclair has been in the outsourcing business for about twenty years and has focussed a lot on financial services and financial institutions looking to outsource.

The closer you get to the core functions of the business the more difficult it is for you to outsource.

So the best thing to do is outsource where it is not your core business. “We’re a law firm so it’s not our business to run a telecommunications firm, so we outsource that. It may be inappropriate to outsource a core function,” Sinclair says.

Sinclair believes that where businesses can go wrong by having unrealistic expectations about the amount of savings that outsourcing can achieve for them.

“If you think about what a supplier is trying to achieve,” he says, “in a perfect world they’ll want to achieve a 20 percent margin on the costs for each outsourcing.

You typically see CFO’s thinking I want to achieve 20, 30 percent savings by doing this outsourcing and then they find out that it may only be 10 percent.”

OUTSOURCING HOTSPOTS

In terms of where outsourcing is greatest, UK and Ireland remain dominant in this market and are forecast by Forrester Research to account for 75 percent of all European offshore outsourcing by 2011.

“I think for 2010 we’re seeing the emergence of outsourcing in complex and emerging markets; so middle-eastern portfolios that haven’t really been touched,” explains Mike Gedye. “The supply chain and markets are beginning to see some maturity, so we’ll see more outsourcing in emerging markets.”

Sinclair mirrors Gedye’s opinion and offers a few destinations to which wealthy countries with high labour rates will outsource to take advantage of lower rates.

“When we look at projections, it’s interesting because they suggest that the Middle East and Africa will be the next frontier on off-shoring/near-shoring. And they mention in particular the UAE and Garner along with Egypt and Jordan.”

A well defined and coherent outsourcing proposal, based on realistic figures and predicted savings just might be the tool you need to see your business grow.

Source:http://www.businessrevieweurope.eu/business-features/operations/when-why-and-where-you-should-outsource

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

Love and Outsourcing

August 22nd, 2010

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

China proves tough for India’s outsourcers

August 17th, 2010

India’s information technology outsourcing companies have established global footprints that stretch from Saudi Arabia to San Diego in the US. Yet they have struggled to develop one of the most promising markets, just over the Himalaya mountains in neighbouring China.

So difficult a frontier is the Chinese market for India’s pioneering outsourcing groups that their leaders would sooner talk about the potential of Latin America than the world’s fastest growing large economy.

Yet some are still trying to make inroads, recognising the risks of shunning the lucrative opportunity presented by large, fast-growing Chinese companies. Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT outsourcing group, said on Tuesday that it planned to double its 1,100-strong workforce in China in the coming year.

China and Japan are widely acknowledged by India’s software leaders to be the hardest outsourcing markets to crack. Japan gets its rating on account of a perceived resistance to change among its country’s businesses and a lack of urgency to innovate, while China’s difficulty is ascribed to cultural differences. Both markets pose linguistic challenges for an Indian sector that has prospered using English as its medium.

“China, while it has significant potential, takes time to learn. It’s not easy,” says N. Chandrasekaran, the chief executive of Mumbai-based TCS, which employs about 160,000 people worldwide.

“We want to grow. We want to grow faster but it takes time to learn the market, attract people and retain people. Attrition levels are higher in China than they are in India and that makes it difficult.”

Most Indian outsourcing companies have established operations in China. They recognise the potential of servicing big, fast-growing Chinese companies with large customer bases and sizeable workforces, and developing expertise to service other parts of Asia.

Wipro Technologies, the Bangalore-based IT services company, has opened a global delivery centre in Chengdu, in addition to a facility in Shanghai. Its Chengdu centre offers services for manufacturing, banking, financial services and insurance industries. It has expertise in English, Chinese and Japanese.

Genpact, India’s largest business processing company, operates BPO service centres in the Chinese cities of Changchun, Dalian and Shanghai.

Suresh Vaswani, joint chief executive of Wipro, puts the challenges of building scale down to more granular market-related issues. He says India’s nimble private sector often finds it difficult to come to terms with China’s more state-driven enterprises.

He identifies strong possibilities working with multinationals in China and large domestic companies. But he recommends that any business strategy take into account the “state-influenced” nature of the market, and the need to create local jobs.

Pramod Bhasin, the chief executive of Genpact, agrees that India’s entrepreneurial style of doing business does not easily gel with China’s more deliberate business culture.

One of the keys to success, he says, is knowing how to navigate China’s corporate power structure, and the complicated personal networks that lead to business opportunities. Another is learning from the example of successful US companies such as McKinsey, IBM and Accenture that establishing a Chinese identity, and hiring a Chinese workforce, are essential. “In China, we are Chinese,” he says simply.

In spite of the obstacles, there is an increasing willingness among large Chinese companies including state-owned enterprises to outsource certain services to create a growing onshore market in China.

Beijing is taking steps to encourage the outsourcing industry, whose revenues grew to about $26bn last year, according to Deloitte, the auditing firm. This month, the Ministry of Finance announced that outsourcing service providers in 21 cities would be freed from business tax on offshore contracts until 2014.

Industry executives in China say Indian companies struggle to get the best out of their Chinese operations. “It is much easier for Chinese companies to manage large-scale operations in China with Chinese staff,” says Seth Pinegar, vice-president at iSoftStone, a leading Chinese outsourcing services provider.

The difficulties encountered by India’s outsourcers have caught the eye of New Delhi. Earlier this year, Anand Sharma, India’s commerce minister, extracted a personal commitment from Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to rebalance a booming bilateral trading relationship skewed overwhelmingly in China’s favour.

Source:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/77b4a4b8-aa18-11df-9367-00144feabdc0.html

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • FriendFeed
  • LinkedIn
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Facebook
  • MySpace
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Sphinn
  • Mixx
  • Blogplay
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • Live
  • Posterous
  • Technorati
  • Add to favorites
  • RSS
  • email
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Identi.ca
  • Hyves
  • IndianPad
  • Yahoo! Bookmarks

Post to Twitter

Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes