David Bass, 48, Manager, Applications Development at Time Customer Service, a Time Warner company, is a pioneer in some ways. He began offshoring work to India in 1993 — long before India, or any other country, figured on the offshoring radar of corporate America. He also dared to leave the comfort of his home in balmy Tampa, Florida, and got his hands soiled dealing with his service provider in the far away Southern Indian city of Chennai. He relocated with his family in early 2000, staying on for three years before moving back to Tampa at the beginning of 2003.
Relocating to the service provider’s destination was a significant departure from the existing industry practice of managing vendor relations from the head office. Even today, when offshoring has comparatively matured, outsourcing managers rarely visit the service provider’s site until the work is transitioned offshored.
Being at ground zero has its advantages. It helps you to appreciate the service provider’s capabilities and business imperatives. “In the beginning, you tend to look at the vendor through a cultural haze,” says Bass. “As you get to understand the culture, you begin to appreciate the high quality of work, and it becomes an immensely rewarding experience.”
Global Services has been in touch with Bass for almost a year, tracking how he and his company are efficiently managing their various offshore providers. We present a case study on the company’s outsourcing journey and the best practices it adopted along the way.
“In The beginning you view the Vendor through a cultural haze. But spending time at ground zero helps to understand the culture and you begin to appreciate the high quality of work.”
David Bass,
Manager,
Applications Development,
Time Customer Service
Multivendor Strategy
Time Customer Service is a Time Warner company that supports all of Time Inc.’s subscriber base and customers such as National Geographic and Harvard Business Review. In all, it supports about 60 million subscribers for 60 publications.
Like in any other industry, providing support to publishing houses requires an understanding of domain-related processes — such as order fulfillment, label production, bill generation and response generation. It was to maintain the applications to support these services that Time Customer set out to find an offshore partner in 1993. It found TCS. It also found other smaller vendors — IMR, Alit and Data Dimensions — to do its Y2K-related work.
By 2000, as the outsourcing initiative became strategic, and the company found that it was not being able to meet all its needs through TCS, Bass was sent down to manage from close quarters. Bass did two things: One he tightened the relationship with TCS; and two he got in another vendor — Covensys. A few years later, he brought in SipTech, another vendor to handle the company’s legacy applications.
The Namesakes
Time and TCS have another platform to feel good about their relationship. The abbreviated form of Time Customer Service (TCS) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) being the same, they refer to each other as the Times and the Tatas. These are small things to celebrate in a relationship.
Two reasons drove the company to get in smaller, boutique vendors. One, the unique demands of process fulfillment required the company to be able to work with its offshore partner as an extension of their onshore resources. Two, TCS had a culture of rotating its project staff every 18–24 months, making it extremely difficult for Time Customer to retain their knowledge base.
SipTech Affinity, a start-up firm, proved a perfect fit. A boutique provider that did not have rigid standardized process, it could adapt to the Time way of doing things. An advantage of working with boutiques is that customer companies can work very intimately with them without having the liability of owning them.
