Systech’s Outlook on Outsourcing to Emerging India
“Systech’s outlook on Outsourcing to Emerging India”, a BI Insight Interview with Maruthu Pandian, VP Operations India, Systech India Pvt. Ltd.
Although things look gloomy for the larger global economy, in an economic downturn, cost will trump value considerations. Many organizations that are not outsourcing will consider or move aggressively to outsource their IT or business processes to focus on their core business.
In such a state of fierce competition in outsourcing, what is the Mantra that Systech India is adopting to stay a Strategic leader in Offshore Development? This interview with Maruthu Pandian, Vice President India-Operations, Systech India Pvt. Ltd. discusses Systech’s priorities and expectations in offshore development and Outsourcing to India.
BI Insight: What specifically are your roles in Systech India?
Maruthu: My focus is to encourage innovation, quality management and stream line operations right from identifying talent, developing skill sets to forming project teams. I am also responsible for customer experience and employee satisfaction.
BI Insight: How organized is the Outsourcing Model in Systech India?
Maruthu: Our outsourcing model is built on the three pillars; Integration, Intelligence and Innovation. I call it the 3Is. These are bunch of initiatives that are aimed to help our client achieve their BI strategies.
Integration – we have well structured strategies to efficiently execute processes that provide a seamless platform with the required collaborative tools. This enables all the stake holders; onsite, offshore and our customers to get interconnected and efficiently handle project scenarios particularly those that require some level of collocation.
Intelligence – in this stream we focus on our abilities to mobilize the intelligence created within the company over the years and apply it in every project task to attain excellence.
Innovation – we have devised mechanisms to constantly implement change in the way we deliver our project or create significant new efficiencies.
BI Insight: What is unique about Systech’s Offshore Technology? And how do you deal with the competition?
Maruthu: We offer the best customer experience whether it’s new BI application development or support work. Our offshore technology framework is designed after analyzing the processes from both the customer’s perspective and project team delivery point of view.
BI projects specifically have lot of customer touch points even before the start of the project, during the project and even after the implementation. Our technical consultants handle every touch point with good understanding of the business process that helps to interpret the data and speak customer lingo. This helps them to have a successful handshake at every point.
BI Insight: What are the advantages that Systech’s clients get by using Offshore Technology Center?
Maruthu: One, High success ratio, we have a meticulously designed mechanism that enforces process discipline among offshore project team; this helps us to achieve predictable outcomes.
Two, Ability to scale up, we hold a pool of specialized BI talent across the verticals which help to accelerate the project pace when required.
Three, Uninterrupted Service, proven frameworks like on-demand resource pool and structured transition methodologies help us to provide transparent and round the clock service.
And four, Cost Saving, Utilizing global talent helps us to reduce cost Example, Offshore 2.5 to 1 employee
BI Insight: In reference to outsourcing to India, it is said that the Indians are executers and not creators, how do you like to defend that?
Maruthu: The advantage I see India have is that it is both an executor and a creator depending on the opportunity presented.
As Economies grew, the immediate business opportunities were more of service in nature than innovation. When the outsourcing opportunities sprouted, India Inc. entered the market right on time and delivered IT and ITES services across the globe; being an early bird enabled to position itself as the market leader in global offshore services.
Having picked all the low hanging fruits, India Inc. has already started moving towards innovation track; driven more by market demand than by choice, I would say. Nano car is a classic example of demand-driven innovation.
BI Insight: How do you respond to the changing market conditions?
Maruthu: We are much focused and have a flat organizational structure that gives us the advantage to quickly respond to demanding market conditions.
The recent trend in offshore market is that clients require greater specialization and a clear view of what offshore consultants do. Our expertise enables us to provide analytics for every business function which is more customer specific than industry specific. Using collaborative tools systems (MS SharePoint and Wiki) and application sharing software provides greater visibility to our process.
BI Insight: Please elaborate on how Vtrain has helped serve Systech’s offshore development center (ODC)?
Maruthu: Vtrain is an in-house built web-based application that helps to identify resource for project deployment, monitor the training programs and organizational talent development. Vtrain Analytics help ODC to align talent development with sales pipeline and forecast.
BI Insight: How different is the outsourcing market now compared to when you started in 1996?
Maruthu: Earlier, companies were looking for offshore service provider to manage non-core operations at low cost. Now it’s much more than moving some functions to lower-cost locations. It’s about rethinking how a company has to organize itself to support the business. I think the current trend is to retain functions that require substantial costs to implement, like R&D and manufacturing and move functions that will realize positive return on investments more quickly such as IT and ITES services.
