Of superstores and super size

Once again Mark Kobayashi-Hillary of the Talking Outsourcing blog (http://markkobayashihillary.computing.co.uk) came up with a little gem of info.

During a meeting over coffee in London with a friend, who just happens to be a consultant who often works on supplier comparison, helping companies to look at the strengths and weaknesses of different suppliers, and hopefully helping them to pick the right one for their project.

His coffee companion told him that he recently had a client with a fairly small project. Probably about £50,000 a year of work (approx $100,000) to a supplier, comparatively small in comparison to some of the recently announced mega ICT outsource projects, but the client was interesting and so the potential was clearly there for the relationship to grow bigger. It was a helpdesk project that could expand into support for several languages. He went on to say that he had called one of the top 10 Indian suppliers to ask if they would be interested in the project. His call was not returned. He tried calling again. He got nothing but voicemail. After three days of getting voicemail he gave up on them, thinking that if that’s the way they organise their own customer service then how are they going to organise it better for the client?

Read the rest of this entry »

Same ‘quality’…different place?

Far be it from me to suggest that as China responds to global criticism for poor quality goods, artificially low currency and precious little regulation by the introduction of new Chinese labour laws that took effect on Jan 1^st which has significantly raised costs in an already tight labour market, as well as Beijing’s cancellation of preferential policies for exporters which has hit Chinese manufacturers hard, corporations are starting to pack their bags.

With the cost / quality playing field now starting to flatten, lets hope that many of the corporations who outsourced to China for the ultra low costs, start to ‘smartsource’ to more mature destinations or will the ‘false god’ of ultra low labour costs cause us to consider over the next year or 2 where Thomas the Tank engine again be derailed? cars crashing due to exploding tyres? (do you remember those) and your pet dog has to employ food tasters again? Will it be Vietnam, India, Myanmar? One thing for sure, its not going to be Malaysia, who long ago went through the kind of industrial restructuring that China is now beginning to experience and has coincidently recently seen a significant rise in FDI, or is that just plain wishful thinking?

Disorganized ICT contracts burden UK public services