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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Right Sourcing in an Outsourcing Strategy

Sid Mookerji
Monday, December 1, 2008
Sid Mookerji
When we were in school, it was dangerous to be different – it would make us the butt of everyone else’s jokes. Fast forward a few years to the business world – here differentiation is a key to survival. This is especially true in the present times of global slowdown. Faced with more competitive markets and greater demands on cost controls, organizations are taking the fast track to cost-cutting by down-sizing and reorganizing their divisions, streamlining their operations, and closing down unprofitable activities. Companies and individuals have to demonstrate a viable ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ in order to attract both customers and employers. Knowingly or not, all success hinges on being able to outrun competitors in key areas such as price, quality, customer service, technology, reputation, availability, and safety.

Competitive Advantage through Right Sourcing
For companies like SPI, the company I manage, which operates in the IT offshore outsourcing space, one key differentiating factor can be ‘right sourcing’ IT projects, i.e. doing IT project related tasks at the location where it is most effective using resources that are most qualified to perform them.

One of the ways to stay competitive is to be a good ‘right sourcer’ and thus maximize savings for customers without compromising on quality. The value already seen by customers in flexibility and transparency of operations will assist in more effective right sourcing by the organization. The rest of this article discusses the way companies such as ours balance the customer desire of ‘low cost’ with their implicit expectation of successful project execution by utilizing the most optimum mix of geographically dispersed resources – the art of right sourcing.

Customer Expectations
The customers expect you to be an expert in delivering IT projects in a globally distributed environment and provide a low cost solution as a result. Trying to incur a relatively low cost should always be a major objective of any ODC – achieved by focusing on productivity as a primary metric on all projects. It is imperative to deploy state-of-the-art collaboration systems – usually on the Web, to effectively communicate between geographically dispersed teams. This allows more and more work to be performed at the more cost-effective location in India.


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