Outsourcing: Interview with Roop Singh, VP and Head for North America, Europe and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about specific examples where you have made use of near shoring – especially in-country – resourcing for corporations? What locations have you chosen, for what reasons, and what drove those choices? What are cost structure dynamics, etc.?

Roop Singh: Let’s take the example of North America. In North America, given the tightening immigration policies and the fact that unemployment and the economic crisis hit, we took a proactive view and set up our development center in Atlanta. We said that in the next 60 years we will have 5,000 individuals working out of that center. When we talk about individuals I mean people who come out of colleges – graduates. So we use the same training program that we had in India, when we started offshoring, to bring these individuals up to scope in terms of how sourcing can work – training them the same way, giving them the same infrastructure, sending them to India to understand how we used to do it. We use that as an in-country sourcing center for organizations that they wanted to outsource. So you are actually helping the local community. Today we have about 1,600 local employees there, and most of them come from schools that we used to put them through training programs.

SM: Can you talk about which schools you source from for your Atlanta center?

RS: It is mainly the local colleges that we go after.

SM: Does that include community colleges, or are we only talking about universities?

RS: Community colleges as well. If they come from a community college, we take them through a more aggressive program in terms of engineering capabilities we would need from a software point of view. If we take them from a university, we have more of a preference for engineering students.

SM: Is Atlanta your only center in North America?

RS: We also have a center in New Jersey, which is an acquisition we have done. We use that one for our developed services as well. We train people there. We have around four to five centers in that region, but this is a center that we set up as a way of developing local capability, which we then source internally.

SM: What do you foresee? What is the total workforce trend in North America for Wipro?

RS: We are about 11,500 people in North America. They represent roughly 10% of our workforce today.

SM: And what do you foresee is going to happen in North America?

RS: I expect more development of these centers as we go along. We made a five-year plan when we set this up about 30 months ago, that we will get to a strength of about 5,000 in that center. I suspect we will go down that route. Similarly, we will set up more centers in that region. We have replicated that model in Europe. We have set up centers in Manchester, Norwich, and Reading, where again we are using those as insource facilities. We provide all the sourcing capabilities to a large utility company in the UK, for example. It is a program where we bring in resources and train them.

SM: Because of the history of the company, you have the ability to effectively run in-house universities. You have done that successfully in India at scale. Doing that in other parts of the world is not that complicated, right?

RS: It is not complicated, but it is a different set of challenges. As you are well aware, retention in India is much higher, because you are coming to that sort of environment. Here you are training people more aggressively and getting them to be familiar with how outsourcing actually works. We are sending them to India, and we are also getting people from India to tell them how this has been working. It has been very positive. We have become attractive as an employer in the region.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Interview with Roop Singh, VP and Head for North America, Europe and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services
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