Swine Flu Could Dent Mexico’s Prospects in Outsourcing
In the recent past, Mexico has been in headlines for all the bad reasons. After drug-related crime and border violence, it’s the swine flu that is tarnishing the country’s image as a preferred nearshore outsourcing destination.
Even though the real impact on the country’s services delivery capabilities is yet to be measured, companies are avoiding or delaying visits to Mexico. Some of the centers run by leading outsourcing vendors have been temporarily shut down. How would these companies handle the ongoing projects in these centers is not yet known.
The swine flu is sure to disrupt outsourcing activity in Mexico. After all, it is not easy to migrate or transition work to other centers over a few days, especially when people can’t travel around freely.
Due to their years of experience and more advanced processes, established outsourcing Mexican cities like Mexico City, Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey might be able the tackle the situation better than the emerging outsourcing cities such as Guadalajara and Queretaro.
From a risk management and business continuity point of view, companies would need to factor in such additional risk factors as epidemics.
It would be interesting to know how companies in the outsourcing industry are braving the current crisis. If there are companies that have been innovative in handling the swine flu crisis and containing its impact, their stories would surely be both interesting and inspiring. Do share with us such stories and let the outsourcing industry benefit from it.
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the use of face masks and boosting your immune system by taking lots of vitamin-C is still an effective way of preventing the spread of the Swine Flu virus.
the spread of AH1N1 or Swine Flu is really scary. It is a good thing that this virus is not very deadly. We are advised to take Vitamin-C and to wear face masks.
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Thanks,
Dennis
I just came back from the Gartner Outsourcing Services Summit and all the outsourcing analysts did not even mention the flu as a stopper to conduct IT sourcing business with Mexico. I spoke personally with each and one of them and they considered it as a temporary situation that would not affect or dent at all the trends of nearshoring, and was not worth mentioning. As for the border violence, I’d recommend the author of this note to read the issue of Business Week of two weeks ago about how it did not at all affect or deter US companies to conduct business with Mexico.
I’m not sure is the article is just speculative, wishful thinking from a country perspective or otherwise. Certainly it is not based on facts. I’d be happy to provide the author with the right information that would help him or her to get the correct perspective. The autor should also contact MexicoIT (contact information found at http://www.mexico-it.com) to update his or her information on this topic.
During the past week, we at Softtek have made a significant effort to provide a safe environment for our associates. Thanks to the support of our associates and clients, we were able to implement a remote work infrastructure, by which the majority of our team does not need to be present at Softtek’s site. The percentage of people working remotely varied from one site to the other, and it ranged from 50 percent up to 80 percent of personnel working from home. In addition to that, we have applied various sanitary measures. As of today, Softtek has the capability to deliver on 100% of its contractual commitments. All 4 of their Global Delivery Centers (GDCs) in Mexico are operational, and zero associates have been diagnosed with influenza A-H1-N1.
We also created a website http://www.softtek.com/swine-flu/ which is regularly updated with information on the current outbreak in Mexico and the U.S., its implications with regards to the operations of Softtek, and its possible repercussions with regards to the ongoing client support activities. (The website also includes a summary of sanitary measures taken at our GDCs.) As the contingency comes to an end and in order to comply with Mexican government’s recommendations, on May 6th, we have started relocating our associates to Softtek’s site through a phased approach that will be completed by May 11th. With the support and commitment of our clients and associates, we were able to maintain our services without disruption during the sanitary contingency
We have a call center in Monterrey, Mexico. Northern Mexico stayed clean through all of the media circus labled swine flu. We also have operations in Longview, Texas so we have redundancy with human capital. We took many steps to ensure the safety of our agents. Our agents already have their own assigned headsets so the spreading of germs through community headsets is not an issue. We also increased the frequency of our cleaning crew to multiple times per day and offered gallons of hand sanitizer to the staff. Anyone not feeling well was sent home immediately with no negative impact to their attendance and anyone that was pregnant was given the week off. The agents saw that we cared about them and were taking steps to ensure their health so we didn’t have anyone abuse the freedoms allowed and everyone worked together to get through this time and take care of our clients. We did postpone one prospect visit from May 5th to May 20th but we proactively did that because he has a newborn baby and we wanted to be sensitive to his home life. After all is done we really didn’t have any issues because we have redundancy in technology and human capital and we were proactive to ensure the safety of our staff.