When a large U.S.-based emissions control products manufacturer wanted to reach out to various target markets around the world, it almost ran into a wall. While the company was keen to tap new markets, the problem was that each country and region had its own definition of emission standards and regulatory frameworks to tackle it.
With little choice, it went scouting for law firms that could provide a comprehensive report on global emission standards and products acceptable in various countries. Since a firm in the U.S. would cost anything from $300–$400 an hour to undertake such a global study, it looked at one of the Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) specialists in India. It found a Mumbai-based firm, focused on legal processes, and at an affordable price of $50–$75 an hour for the same task.
The 10 people team in this company, comprising lawyers and engineers, studied automobile emissions globally, did the intellectual property, legal and technical analysis and presented the report to the American firm. “On the face of it, this might sound elementary, but it reflects the choices that global companies have when it comes to sourcing critical tasks that impact their businesses,” says a top honcho of the Mumbai-based law firm. “In this case we provided actionable reports to the company. On the basis of that, the company can tweak its products to meet emission standards in various countries.” For reasons of privacy, both the customer and the provider declined to share names.
That’s the kind of complexity global service providers are able to deliver. They understand customers’ businesses well and have trained teams who are exposed to nuances of law in various countries and can produce reports that impact a company’s business irrespective of geographical location.
The average compensation of an IIM Ahmedabad (India’s premier management institute) graduate working on analytics assignments is about $20,000 a year, while someone from a leading business school in the U.S. could take home as much as $120,000 a year.
Engaging High-skilled Workers
Interestingly, service providers are not falling on fresh graduates (as is usually the case with routine outsourced jobs) to do such work. They are engaging experts with up to 15 years of experience. These inxclude PhDs in statistics and mathematics, engineers, lawyers, doctors, chartered accountants, CFAs and others. “The value add includes the ability to mine significantly larger amounts of data by employing larger research and analytics teams offshore, leading to more robust business insights,” says Ramit Sethi, SVP, Wipro BPO.
With such work, service providers are also able to get better billing-rate assignments, and can offer better savings to clients — at times almost 70%. The reason is that there are wider gaps in the wages of professionals undertaking such tasks. For instance, average compensation of an IIM Ahmedabad (India’s premier management institute) graduate working on analytics assignments is about $20,000 a year, while someone from a leading business school in the U.S. could take home as much as $120,000 a year. Moreover, hiring a PhD in the U.S. to do the job will be even more expensive. Whereas in India, a top-end PhD is available at wages lower than what an Indian B-school grad would take home.
Research and analytics providers typically offer four services: quantitative analytics and modeling, business research and analytics, capital-markets processing and research, market research and analytics. The kind of tasks they can do include demand and channel planning, manufacturing scheduling and transport planning as part of supply chain management solutions. Many companies do not have in-house specialists who can look at the problem and come up with viable models.
Western customer companies going to research and analytics providers for such work include wealth-management companies, investment banks, mortgage banks, utility, insurance firms, hospitality, manufacturing, IT, pharmaceutical, telecom and consumer-finance companies.
Such jobs now being sent to service providers in India, East Europe, Russia, and China mark the maturing of the delivery capability of third-party service providers. “Global vendors are enabling companies to do analysis that could not be easily done before,” says a CEO of a legal-process outsourcing firm. Customers who have seen process and performance improvements are driving it. “We are able to extract value from transactions that helps global clients to tap new business,” says V. Bharathwaj, VP, Global Marketing, 24/7 Customer, a leading management services provider.
| Services on Demand |
| New product research |
| Analytical model development |
| Predictive analysis |
| Marketing, sales and operations |
| Brand perception studies and analysis |
| Legal and technical reports on global markets. |
| Drivers for KPO |
| Labor arbitrage |
| Availability of high-end skills |
| Customer companies growing familiarity with offshore providers |
| Need for customers to target more markets, even emerging ones |
| Ease of doing research, in terms of costs, quality and time. |
