Organisations also need to create the right blend of supporting technology and services if they are to create lasting value from offshoring.
The primary driver for many organisations to move operations offshore is to reduce costs. However, offshoring can also be used to increase organisational agility, by allowing operations to expand or new services to be launched more quickly and easily. Offshoring can be a key weapon in our clients’ change management programmes as they strive to respond to competitive pressures against a background of skills shortages and high labour costs. Yet offshoring is not the right option for every organisation in all circumstances. It involves a delicate balance between saving on labour costs and spending on building, maintaining and operating an infrastructure that spans more than one country.
A key task in creating that infrastructure is to aggregate all the services needed to do the job – such as timely access to applications and information – into an end-to-end package. This ensures the organisation knows exactly what support needs to be delivered to offshore staff and how to deliver it reliably. Organisations must also continue to meet regulatory obligations when offshoring: technical solutions such as virtualisation environments allow data to continue to be held in the UK to meet data protection requirements.
Centrix has a strong track record in helping clients move processes offshore quickly and successfully by combining business, service and technology expertise. Our expertise and intimate knowledge of major offshore destinations helps clients avoid the pitfalls. We have helped clients to get up and running overseas with hundreds of seats in just six weeks. Our technical expertise has pushed the boundaries in enabling legacy applications to be delivered successfully over low bandwidth links. And our experience in service enhancement has allowed our clients develop offshore operations that deliver the same or better levels of service as keeping them onshore.
In short, Centrix works with clients to understand the true costs and implications of offshoring and determine whether “make” or “buy” is the right option for a particular process. If it is, Centrix helps clients restructure their operations and infrastructure to support successful offshoring.