Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to highlight the evolving change of customers’ perspective on engineering outsourcing and narrate the story on how TCS responded to this and became successful. This paper highlights a couple of projects as examples. It highlights the typical industry needs in product engineering and narrates how such needs are effectively met. The various competencies identified and developed by TCS and experiences on similar lines are described in this paper. This paper also summarises the changed needs of the customer and key factors for success in engineering outsourcing.

Introduction - The change has arrived

A decade back, when engineering outsourcing was still in its nascent stage, the work offshored to India predominantly involved creating digital models and drawings. The design activity was not outsourced to India because of various reasons such as concerns with regard to intellectual property, lack of resources with domain knowledge and above all lack of understanding on what really works with outsourcing. The effective collaboration and coordination between the service receiver and service provider were the keys to success in this model and the time spent on the same became a matter of concern to those who were interacting with service providers. As a trend, companies started looking at solutions with increased ownership from service providers to move out from day-to-day monitoring and reviewing of the project. The modelling and detailing encompassed only a portion of the bigger picture (piece-meal type of outsourcing) and companies clearly sensed the need to shift to a bigger chunk of work where increased ownership on the design had to be demonstrated by the service providers. The customers started seeing the need to realise “Value arbitrage” from the engagement to bring competitive products to the market with less overall program spending. The ability of service providers to understand the customer product lines has become increasingly an important factor in choosing the right service provider.

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Updated on: 31 Mar, 2009