18 Mar 2011
IT services provider 2E2 has recently outsourced its SAP support to India, which has allowed it to become more commercially competitive and win two additional contracts.
2E2 selected Mindtree in Bangalore, India to provide helpdesk, support and development services to its clients using SAP.
Although Nick Grossman, 2E2's business development manager, would not go into specifics, he said that 2E2 had won two additional contracts as a result. One of these is in the construction industry.
"This outsourcing deal has lead to us winning additional contracts by allowing us to be commercially aggressive," said Grossman.
"We can scale up and scale down easily, and flexibility is a main driver," he added.
"If we had done this in-house and experienced a massive peak, we would have had to get contractors in, and then we would have had no control on quality".
Grossman also described how the move to outsourcing was a recent development for 2E2.
"We didn't have an outsourcing strategy two years ago," he said.
"But you can't be cost-effective or as agile as the competitor down the road if you don't have one, and it is this that forced us to implement one," he said.
The Mindtree deal came about as a consequence of 2E2 acquiring SAP consulting firm Diagonal last year.
"Diagonal is a £25m consulting division that specialises in SAP," said Grossman.
"Support services for its SAP clients were being run out of an Asian subsidiary in Malaysia," he said.
"However, we sold these at the end of last year and agreed we would completely outsource it to India."
"India provided us with a far more commercially viable environment, and it is extremely versatile when compared with Malaysia. It is lower cost and provides us with the ability to scale up and down when needed".
In the past 18 months 2E2 has also outsourced its infrastructure services to Patni, which is based in Delhi, India.
Patni has 100 staff that deliver IT and application support internally to 2E2, but also offer a whole range of services to 2E2's customers. These services include remote network management, security, data management, and Oracle application support.
"We had discussions with Patni about outsourcing the SAP support to them," said Grossman.
"But they don't have any SAP specialism, which is why we opted for Mindtree. They have a proven track record," he added.
Interesting that 2e2 have outsourced all SAP support to India and have just made a large chunk of their UK SAP support team redundant. Outsourcing will never work long-term as Diagonal found out to their cost in the past. It may be cheaper to have the work done by offshore consultants but in my experience their attitude and the quality of work leaves a lot to be desired. This ultimately just ends up annoying valued customers who will then look elsewhere for support.
Posted by: AB 25 May 2011
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