Outsourcing was once seen as a bad word in the west that meant proliferation of call centers in India, where undergraduates and ordinary graduates would provide customer care support. However, in the last couple of years outsourcing has taken a very different dimension in India with outsourcing expanding beyond low level software jobs and call center jobs to critical services such as market research and analysis, copy editing, patent generation, the drafting of legal documents and engineering plans. The knowledge process outsourcing has also reversed brain drain in India that had plagued the country for decades where the graduates from India’s elite institutions would leave their motherland for better opportunities in the west.
Indian companies are now running entire IT companies, designing Erikson and Nokia phones and monitoring water and wastewater facilities of the Thames Water Utilities Ltd. New Mexico, Nebraska and Mississippi have outsourced their unemployment and taxation payment processes, Mexico has outsourced its social security services and Bahrain has outsourced its e-visas facilities to Indian companies. Although the chief reason for outsourcing work to India is its cheap costs but with clear signs of rising wages, outsourcing seems to rely more on India’s trained workforce than on low production cost.
In fact, the entire outsourcing business has become more diversified. A notable feature of the current outsourcing business is that the Indian companies in their turn are outsourcing their work to countries outside India. With new job opportunities being created in Europe and North America, the Indian multinationals are spreading their tentacles through out the globe.
It's now commonplace to outsource offshore
which means that today the different types
of outsourcing work cover many different
areas. Unskilled manufacturing jobs were
the earliest kinds of outsourced work,
but now outsourcing has reached knowledge-based
positions in information technology (IT)
and engineering. Virtual assistants, customer
service representatives, writers, translators
and medical transcriptionists are other
types of outsourcing work that continue
to be popular.
The Internet and the telephone make outsourcing possible. Companies and workers communicate and send documents back and forth through email. Job interviews may or may not be done over the phone. Virtual assistants, customer service reps, writers, translators, medical transcriptionists and technical workers are all outsourcing work that may be done virtually on an independent contractor basis.
outsourcing work may also be traditional on-site
positions. Many large corporations have divisions
of their companies in overseas locations
such as India and China. They hire workers
in other countries to staff those divisions
and usually keep their labor costs very low.
For instance, in what is often called knowledge-based
outsourcing, companies with overseas divisions
hire engineers and IT workers offshore at
a fraction of the cost of what they must
often pay employees onshore in their home
country.
Outsourced IT and engineering jobs include computer programmers, technical writers and other skilled knowledge-based work. Virtual assistants, customer service reps, writers and translators may outsource offshore for many different clients or they may work mainly for one customer. In order to find the best work, outsourced workers must have the needed skills and be fluent in the language of the hiring company's country.
Why outsource when workers in home countries
need work is asked by many and the answer
usually relates to the money outsourcing
companies save on labor costs. People for
outsourcing work often say global outsourcing
and multinational work relations are positive
things for the economy. Those against outsourcing
usually assert that giving jobs to workers
offshore makes the economy worse onshore
for people needing work.
A decade back the concept of Outsourcing to India was unclear to many people.
However as times have passed and India has seen tremendous developments in
the IT and infrastructure field, the concept of outsourcing is now clear
to many people. In fact most of the people are speaking of it with supreme
knowledge.
If you are thinking why outsource to India and no other countries then the answer is quite simple because India has all the good qualities which can make the exchange of work between countries and companies easy and smooth. Besides infrastructure and technological advancement Indian companies have the ability to cater to vast requirements of clients. Earlier it was only BPO (business process outsourcing) but today it is about almost anything be it law, medicine, accountancy, taxation, software development, web development, web design and the list has no ending.
Cost-effective services: The
main reason why outsourcing to India is at its
peak is that IT companies in India have the ability
to provide cost effective services. Work outsourced
to India can be completed in much less time and
expense. For example if a company in America
spends $20000 on salaries each month of 10 customer
service agents it can in India hire 90 customer
service agents for the same money. The margin
is really big.
High-quality services: Time
and again India has proved that it is technologically
ahead of any outsourcing countries in world.
It has the best infrastructure required to
carry out international operations. Hence when
companies outsource work to India they can
be assured to receive the best quality services
at the most competitive rates. Outsourcing
to India becomes even easier because of its
people are fluent in English which does not
make language a barrier for business communications.
Time Zone Advantages: Another important
advantage of outsourcing to India is the time difference. When it is day
here it is night in countries like USA and UK. This benefitted the companies
that wished to provide 24X7 customer services to their clients. Also it
helps software development companies which have tight project deadlines
and need people to work on it for day and night.
Stable democratic government: The Indian
government has not seen major ups and downs in the years
gone by which has ultimately helped its growth as an outsourcing
destination. Developing the IT sector has been of top priority
for the Indian government. Many steps have been taken by
the government to improve the infrastructure of the nation.
A bill termed the IT act 2000 introduced by the government
of India has been appreciated to be one of the best of
its kind.
Number one Choice: The quality of service provided by software development companies at the best prices as well as favorable government policies has made India the first choice of foreign countries. It has been reported that 80% of the companies in USA preferred outsourcing to India than any other country.