The buyer and the supplier are just five hours apart by car. But from a business standpoint, they couldn’t be farther apart. The customer’s management grew up in capitalist western Europe. The suppliers’ formative years were spent in Communist eastern Europe. How do you fashion an outsourcing relationship that works?
Guy Felton has a love-hate relationship with the Internet. The chief executive officer of Sol Participations SA believes he can remove all the things he hates about the Net by making it a two-way communication medium instead of a one way street. There’s no dialogue, no back and forth on the Net, he carps. There are a lot of people in the world who have the same interests I have. But there’s no civilized way of communicating with them.
Why are outsourcing buyers turning to Indian companies as their suppliers? Ravi Ravisankar, chief executive officer of I-Flex Solutions Ltd, a software development company specializing in the commercial banking industry based in Bombay and Banagalore, says the reasons have changed over time.
Like the country and western song, the offerings of Indian and American outsourcing firms are meeting in the middle. This marks a fundamental shift in the offshore outsourcing frontier, according to Dean Davison, vice president of the Meta Group, a technology advisory firm in Stanford, Connecticut…
An American company decided to outsource sensitive software development to a prominent Israeli firm. The outsourcing contract clearly stated that if a dispute arose, all judicial action would take place in New York City, the buyer’s domicile.
The Internet has made offshore outsourcing easier in many ways. But the basic problems inherent in these relationships haven’t changed. The speed has increased but the problems are the same, says Nich Mills, a partner with Procure-IT Strategic Contracting Consulting, an outsourcing consultancy in the Netherlands.
Road warriors, those employees who spend their lives dashing in and out of airports for the good of their companies, often rate compiling their expense reports as one of their most dreaded tasks. Typically they stuff their receipts in their briefcases. Then, when the credit card bill payment looms, they fill out the paperwork, staple the receipts to an expense voucher and submit the stack of paperwork for reimbursement. Their employers then had to key in all the appropriate numbers before authorizing accounting to cut them a check. Hopefully none of the slips of paper got lost as they changed hands…
Adrian Moore, director of privatization and government reform for the Reason Public Policy Institute, a think tank in Los Angeles, California, says the problem with government management is up until now they have had no economic performance incentives to examine and improve their processes. Unlike businesses, they have no angry customers telling them exactly what’s wrong with their business (and how much they hate standing in line.) If your process takes too long or costs too much, the government agency doesn’t lose customers, says Moore. Where else can you get a driver’s license?
Road guards are people who try to keep you from making changes. Some have root rot because they have been in place so long. But I like to change and improve things! states Jim Jones, head of reengineering at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (ALC). The Center’s personnel currently are working on 12 improvement projects, one of which is activities-based costing (ABC)…
All levels of American government are feeling the twin — and conflicting — pressures of reducing costs while improving performance. Legislative budget cuts are forcing agencies to turn to government consultants like Mevatec, a Huntsville, Alabama firm, to help them satisfy these twin dragons. In the past government agencies routinely increased their annual budgets.
A deluge of research studies on nearly every aspect of outsourcing has been conducted during the past decade, ever since it gained recognition as a strategic business tool to gain competitive advantage and became one of the top ten issues for survival in the 1990s. You’ve no doubt read many of them.
Outsourcing Buzz Blog Outsourcing Alert