Consolidating Outsourcing for the Outsourcers

Turns out that the outsourcers also outsource:

A number of Indian outsourcers are setting up centers in Europe to offer near-shore services to European customers in their local languages. India's second largest outsourcer, Infosys Technologies, for example, has a service delivery center in Brno in the Czech Republic.

But if you have customers all over Europe, in a bunch of different languages, this can get expensive. Unless, of course, you consolidate the outsourcing operations.

Scotland aims to get Indian outsourcers to set up call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) centers in the country, by offering staff with multilingual capabilities....

Rather than set up a number of small centers in various European countries to support different European languages, Indian outsourcing companies can set up a single center in Scotland, where staff can offer services in up to 25 languages....

Scotland's key advantage is that there are a large number of foreign students who come to study in universities in Scotland, and stay on to work there, said Ronnie Melrose, head of IBM's hardware services delivery in Europe. "This gives us an opportunity to hire people for their language skills," he said.

The government in Scotland has also helped as it gives foreign students graduating from universities in Scotland an automatic work permit, Melrose said.

However, if the language translation is lossy (i.e. information is lost in translation), could issues occur? Especially since one would presume that the native language of a center in Scotland would be Scots?

outsourcing

Sphere: Related Content