Outsourcing: Interview with Roop Singh, VP and Head for North America, Europe and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Especially if you can take the community college population, who is looking to retrain, or the youth population that is trying to find the path … if you have the capabilities to train them and make them productive. I almost feel that the retention rate in North America would be a lot higher than in India.

Roop Singh: That is correct. A community college can also be an active player in business process outsourcing for call centers or for knowledge processing. There are mechanisms to bring them in and train them during their careers in terms of the directions they want to take. There are options.

SM: What is the preferred size of an operation? Is it 2,000, 5,000, etc.? At what point do you start looking for another operation? What is the though process and the algorithm for that?

RS: When you are looking at insourcing strategies, the economy of scale really doesn’t come into it so much because you are working in a center for several clients. If you are working for one client, economy of scale plays a factor. If you are saying, “I am only going to source 100 people from Wipro in in country sourcing,” then economy of scale might have an impact. But because we use the center for several clients, they don’t feel that cost ratio.

SM: From the point of attracting talent, you would rather build an operation of 20,000 people in Atlanta rather than spreading it out in the U.S.? Is that the right way to do it? Or is it better to just spread it around 5,000-people operations around the country?

RS: Our intention is to create three or four centers, one in each region. Our intent is to spread around the country. Generally what we also found is a trend: When you have insourcing in the country, you find that the client is more willing to get the individuals to come to their site. That is why the retention in in-country sourcing strategies is much better. You know the client, you see the client, and the client is willing to come and meet them and also engage with them.

SM: I also think culturally the Indian IT industry developed a very bad habit of constantly jumping around. For whatever reason, over the last 20 years it has had a very unstable and unappetizing base of employees, with no loyalty. I don’t think you have that cultural baggage in the U.S.

RS: It is also about the quality of work. When IT sourcing started in India, a lot of people moved around very quickly because they felt they could get on to better projects and this created a skill shortage. People have a choice. They always jumped to better projects and better companies. For example, when some of the U.S. or European majors moved into India and started creating offshore centers, they attracted a lot of attention from established players. The impression was that if you were working for organizations that came from the outside, the quality of work would be better. What they didn’t realize was that in fact that was not the case. You had reverse attrition. What we find is if you are opening in-country centers, the quality of work you get from the client is higher. It is not only because of the cultural factor, but they also feel more secure giving that sort of quality of work to locals – and they can visit more frequently.

This segment is part 3 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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