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Former Member
Feb 28, 2008 at 01:12 PM

Offshoring - has its time been and gone

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Hi guys -- this is the Coffee corner so please read this thread in the spirit in which it was originally intended.

The two areas where I've had to deal with "Off shored" facilites are in ABAP development and in Telephone Call centres.

My experience with BOTH has usually been at best a totally frustrating exercise, or at worst nothing less than an unmitigated disaster.

Customer experience in the UK at least with Off shored Telephone Call centres have been such a disaster that some Banks are now actually making TV commercials saying "UK Call centres Only".

Since a lot of Indians speak excellent English (often better than Native speakers) this can only be a resounding vote of NO to this type of actiivity.I

I found that one answer to avoid the hassle with these call centres was to call the DUTCH help number - most of these guys don't speak Dutch so the help desks are still actually located in Holland (or for any other language than English you could possibly use the same "bypass" to get a local help desk).

Looking at the typical queries raised on the various ABAP Forums as well - where people from this part of the world are posting the most elementary questions (or often worse - asking for complete solutions before they even realize that computer keyboards do actually have an F1 or HELP key on them) only confirms my view that this was a short term expedient for USA corporation chiefs to make their balance sheets look good in the very short term, inflate the share price hugely and move on pocketing HUGE bonuses on the way while leaving other people to pick up the pieces.

Where it DOES work is in such things as providing cheaper hardware infrastructure such as Networking or components -- but there is no way you can run business processes sensibly without functional consultants ON SITE especially now with B2B, C2B, B2C and all sorts of 24 hour online processes -- you can't wait 3 days while you explain the process to someone on the other side of the world whats happening, find a fix, write a Spec, wait for them to go through their change management procedures, test it and then find the progammer has either not understood the problem or there is a defect in the solution etc etc.

Maybe running Batch relatively constant stuff like payroll or some FI applications might work but in the scenario I've described above you will find that your customer has gone elsewhere.

Offshoring CAN work if the correct things are offshored but the mass wholesale offshoring nearly everything has as a lot of people predicted only ended in tears both to the source country who liost the jobs in the first place and the newer country where once these jobs have gone will never return owing to the complete customer dissatisfaction with the whole process.

I'm not talking sour grapes here -- I've been in SAP more years thabn I care to remember as a freelancer and now more than ever the phone is still ringing off the hook.

Cheers

Jimbo