Engineering services: Big outsourcing opportunity (India)

[OhioChick]

October 16, 2006 13:21 IST

Taking the BPO-KPO wheel forward, the offshoring industry is looking to tap the $750 billion-a-year global engineering services industry.

India enjoys a relatively strong position in the automotive and high-tech telecom engineering services market with a $25 billion opportunity by 2020, according to a latest industry report. Aerospace offers the greatest potential for expansion - though it is also one of the toughest opportunities to tap because of its close association with the defence sector.

"The total offshore engineering spend is expected to grow to $150-$225 billion by the year 2020, and India with its talent pool and existing experience in engineering services, is well suited to realise 25 per cent of this opportunity," Kiran Karnik, president, Nasscom.

"Companies in India have developed capabilities and skill sets, and invested in technology platforms to leverage this opportunity. The growth in engineering services signifies the need for global corporations to expand their R&D pool beyond their home countries," said Karnik in the report.

http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2006/oct/16bpo.htm

[liberal N proud]

1. You get what you pay for!

Our Engineering director thought that outsourcing to India would be great for the company.

More than a year ago, he had a revelation in a meeting, he even thought that a designer we have who is originally from India could just move back there and take care of it for us.

That was until, I pointed out all the problems it presented.
I create an extensive report and included all the barriers it would present for our company as well as some things I found about the quality of the work vs the claimed savings and the rework that many companies had to do when they got the work back from India.
The report detailed the following areas:
- Communication & relationships between engineers and designers
- Tolerance concerns
- Standards
- Scheduling & Managing the work
- Technology
- Quality of work vs cost

You get what you pay for

[OhioChick]

2. Now if you could

send that report to every company in the US thinking of outsourcing.....

[AZCat]

3. The local ASHRAE chapter had a panel discussion on this last year.

The ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) discussion was about the lack of qualified local workers and what we could do to improve the situation, but one of the local Professional Engineers is from India and talked about the offers he gets to do work - primarily drafting, but there are designers available. With building systems it is still advantageous to have a design engineer who can visit the site, but drafting up a set of sketches from an engineer isn't that complicated, and we are having difficulty getting qualified people, although we are working with the local schools to change that. The consensus at the ASHRAE meeting seemed to be that we would all rather have people working here for us than outsource - as the poster upthread suggested there are many potential problems with that solution.