Generous skepticism greeted Anita Manwani, VP and GM of Global Sourcing at Agilent, when she proposed that all of Agilent’s collection activities be moved to India. Clients who heard a markedly different accent at the other end of the line, skeptics predicted, would never pay their bills.

Not too many quarters later, the pessimism proved false. It wasn’t just the fact that the finance team managed to surpass the highest ever quarterly collections; they had taken the whole exercise into quite another dimension.
Most of them had managed to establish themselves on very good terms with the clients. They sympathized with those who were going through a bad relationship, enquired after daughters who had fallen ill, and even exchanged Christmas gifts over continents.

Cheap Marble. But Good.
Which just goes to prove what she emphasizes repeatedly: Agilent’s presence in India is all about quality, and about results. It is about cost as well, but that’s not the only factor. (Nor are they in India, she remarks, for the love of the Taj.)

That is something that many people haven’t quite understood. For example, there is a tendency to assume that since the employee in a cheap labor market is paid less than his developed nation counterpart, it is logical to assume that his work output is proportionately less. A bit like a problem in high-school arithmetic: if you have 20 people doing a job in the U.S. for a certain wage, then how many people would you need to do the same work at a tenth of the wage?

Manwani knows the fallacy; so she has advised the training managers to say, “If you have 20, we don’t see why we can’t have just 18 in India.”

Such misconceptions are quite understandable: the image of India, and the Indian workforce, has been changing only in the last few years or so. Even Manwani—with prior experience in India, over a decade ago—found herself experiencing what she neatly terms a “big a-ha.”

The times they are a-changin’
When she had come to India then, the task at hand was to take Hewlett Packard’s India operations and knock it into shape. This she did with more than some success: the measly 10-person set-up she found grew into a robust 200-man operation by the time she left. It was no easy task: barriers to entry were much harder, and India wasn’t really well known as an offshoring or outsourcing destination.

Not so this time. And it wasn’t just the business environment, the reason why a company looked at India itself had changed. The last time the move wasn’t because there was a great market. Rather it was an almost nonchalant “yeah, there’s an R&D capability there, and anyway Motorola, IBM and TI had facilities, so we must put up something.”

The present entry has significantly higher levels of enthusiasm: the market is nascent, the market environment itself is changed, and there’s far more competition and work ethic.

The Agilent facilities boast world class facilities. In fact, Manwani says, employees who visit in the course of transition are impressed enough to remark that “wow, we don’t have such facilities back home.”

The workforce is of higher standard too, a fact that she attributes to increased experience with Six Sigma companies. Such a workforce can be a bit of a challenge, but one that is easily surmountable. Bringing in people from different work cultures can be a serious problem if not handled deftly. “They come from the GEs, the AMEX, the Lucents, not to mention many local companies. We are in India to stay, and so are definitely keen on creating our own strong, distinct culture. We have various programs to address this issue, not to forget a stronger management on the ground.”

Tapering Troubles
If Manwani remarks ‘a-ha’ once more, in reference to her experience with the bureaucracy this time, one couldn’t really blame her for doing so. While she was quite sure of the results that could be expected of the workforce, she couldn’t help having some doubts about the ease of setting up operations.

The board okayed the initial project in June 2001, and she started work in July. The aim was to have the whole set-up up and running in three months.

It was simply not possible, many averred, to have a legal entity with a physical presence functional—or to have a network up and running—in such a short while. To add to the troubles, two aircrafts collided with prominent landmarks in September, and there was a general air of worry that wasn’t exactly conducive to business abroad. However, she says, “while 9/11 was a deterrent in many ways, it also proved to be an accelerant in others.”

“I believe the Indian bureaucracy has come a long way,” Manwani says. But any time she had an “across the table” conversation, she just had to tell them about the profile of the company, the investments they were thinking of making, and the targets. The turnaround was literally within 24 hours. She really needn’t have brought along her pair of scissors; the only red tape to cut was the inaugural one, and the government even provided her with the scissors to do that.

Hybrid Strategy
All this ensured that Agilent could carry on with minimum fuss what they had come to India for. And it wasn’t just one sector: they had a range of interests, which they carried out through a variety of means.

Their first push was in the financial services side. They moved most of their vendor tables—the easier part of the equations—to India. But what they were looking at went a long way beyond that. They wanted everything from call centers to high end R&D units, with data entry and financial data processing in between. This meant that they needed a “hybrid strategy.”

Their presence couldn’t be satisfactorily established, they decided, with joint ventures or offshore development centers. They inked out a few partnerships and made their own investments. They laid out a standard infrastructure: “imagine,” explains Manwani, “we get five different partners, and each set up an infrastructure of his own. None of it is coming for free. Of course they wuold claim they would manage it and all that, but it would all come in in the form of project costs.”

Also, they didn’t make a decision about having everyone work out of their own facilities. They had no desire to have links coming into their firewall, or let in third parties into the Agilent network.

The local partners had their own project managers, while Agilent took the responsibility for infrastructure, security and so on. The financial services were all handled by Agilent employees, while they tapped the vast Indian market for R&D on the communications solutions side

Agilent doesn’t really have a specific development for a particular geography, except some localization tweaks in a few far-eastern countries. Their global production work happens in India, as well as the R&D for the global market, which is also sold in India. They also have several quality of service products in the telecom area, like testing for VoIP. Agilent in India now also make instruments for diagnostics, engineering and automation, besides a few for the defense sector.

The Last Word
When Agilent worldwide shifted to an Oracle ERP system, most of their service and warranty orders were stacking up. This significant source of revenue stood stagnant for over a quarter—no one having any idea of what to do in the new environment. Except Manwani, who was sure the India team could handle it. Doubtful eyebrows shot up, followed by remarks as to the complexity of the system. It would take at least 4 weeks of training, the skeptics said.

The team did it in one week flat. A week later, Agilent was not only done the backlog, but had to eliminate shifts that had no more work to clear.

It is of little wonder then, that Agilent is to double its size over the next three years–from the current level of over a thousand, between two facilities. The Agilent chairman announced this on his last visit to India.

Which, Manwani insists, was not just to see the Taj.