International Outsourcing Hurdles in Value-added Services

International Outsourcing has been traditionally looked upon as a low end cost effective servicing option to take advantage of the cost arbitrage that exists across countries. Of late, many outsourcing vendors have realized that the advantages of cost differentials that spurred a lot of the global outsourcing business in the past 20 years will disappear in the medium term. This paper provides a perspective about how much value addition, besides cost, traditional outsourcing vendors can provide and what may be the facilitator/ inhibitors of such activities. To substantiate the claim, a brief case describing the setting up of an offshore analytics operation is presented which gives a back drop to the challenges faced in relatively high end value creation processes in a remote outsourced environment. [W.P. No. 2008-06-03]