Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Becoming a Preferred Outsourcing Destination

New sourcing destinations which form regional clusters are springing up all over the globe quite often now. Companies looking for alternative to India locations have a wide choice of virtually any sourcing region to do business. And countries within these clusters face the challenge of becoming a preferred sourcing location.

Here are some of the key success strategies for winning destinations:

- focus on establishing favorable tax and regulatory environments, implementing government incentives, investing in high quality infrastructure, reducing attrition, and facilitating access to a qualified workforce;

- learn from the experience of established destinations noting the policies, incentives and initiatives these former emerging locations undertook to achieve success;

- ensure a sustainable supply of qualified labor. Countries should have a workforce strategy to continue to scale as well as diversify their skills sets;

- find your niche. As the playing field becomes more competitive, it’s necessary for countries to differentiate not only on the basis of cost, quality etc. but also in terms of the depth, specialization and expertise of their workforce;

- let the world know about you. Ensuring global visibility — especially in prime markets such as US and Europe — should be top priority. Branding that accentuates the region’s uniqueness can have a great impact;

- encourage import of expert resources from established locations and target markets, especially if there are ex-pat’s who can be convinced to return home. Inviting well-known industry evangelists (read consultants, analysts, etc) is also very effective in building goodwill and positive buzz;

- promote benefits of outsourcing industry within the local market. This can be done by convincing domestic or multinational firms to outsource locally or “carve out“their internal operations. Local service providers can be incentivized to build a domestic market.

Source: Global Services