Reference no: EM133498428

Instruction

Review the Case Study in Managing a Global Workforce: Challenges and Opportunities in International Human Resource Management - Case 3.2 India Sending Jobs Abroad and respond to the questions and the end of the case. You can find this case study at the end of Chapter 3 - Managing a Global Workforce.

India Sending Jobs Abroad

One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks and jobs to India. But rising wages, demand for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India's success as a back office-such as China, Morocco, and Mexico-are challenging that model. Many executives acknowledge that globalization will increasingly spread a company's jobs around the globe. The future of offshore sourcing is "to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any other part of the world." To beat emerging rivals offering lower prices and geographic advantage, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in other developing countries, before their clients do. In May 2008, Tata Consultancy Service, which already had five thousand workers in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, announced the opening of a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico. Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania, and Saudi Arabia, among other locations. And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire five hundred programmers in three years. The company was even considering additional hubs in Idaho and Virginia to take advantage of American "states that are less developed."

Infosys, another Indian outsourcing giant, is trying to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call. To achieve this goal, it recently opened offices in the Philippines, Thailand, and Poland. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with minimal supervision from Indian managers. Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, allocate each part to suitable workers, double-check quality, and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can replicate its Indian back offices in other countries and develop Chinese, Mexican, or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them. Some analysts compare such an offshore outsourcing strategy to the Japanese penetration of the U.S. auto market in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource abroad without Indians. In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for example, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would be the best for this task due to the language proficiency and cultural familiarity. But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico. Such is the new offshore outsourcing: a company in the United States hires an Indian vendor headquartered seven thousand miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the U.S. border. Source: Adapted from Anand Giridharadas, "Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs," New York Times, September 25, 2007: A1

Case Study Background Information:

In this section, you will provide a background on the case, the key points that will help to understand your responses to the case study questions.

Question 1: From this case, how would you describe the new of offshore outsourcing? (Response must be no less than 250 words)

Question 2: What did Indian outsourcing companies have to change their strategy? (Response must be no less than 250 words)

Question 3: What kinds of challenges do you anticipate that the Indian companies will face in implement this new outsource strategy?