As the world continues to struggle through the Corona-virus pandemic, businesses are going through tough times. Most of their operations have come to a halt, and some have been grounded completely. The global economy continues to suffocate amid this calamity. Even though countries are beginning to offer different stimuli packages, this may not cover all the needs of companies.
COVID-19 has initiated lock-down all over the world, thus, forcing companies to send their staff to work from home. However, what happens if a company never anticipated such a situation? What if the business doesn’t have sufficient capacity to handle a lock-down, and work from home?
India is one of the leading hubs of world’s IT and ITES Outsourcing and during pandemic situation like this, Indian BPO industry is faced with significant challenges. Western firms are increasingly reliant on business process outsourcing (BPO) functions provided by companies. BPM companies are caught between mobility curbs and client protocol that disallows work-from-home.
The good news is IT outsourcing has not been impacted much despite Global or local lock-down situation. While some Indian IT companies were caught unaware due to sudden lock-down announced by PM however the agile ones still scrambled to arrange laptops, Internet connections at employee’s home, remote Infra support and whatever it took to make the sudden transition to this longest lasting work-from-home set ups.
Interesting Read: How IT Outsourcing is Helping Global Companies Amidst This Global Corona Lock-down
The US is the largest consumer of IT outsourcing on demand side with supplies largely being met through outsourcing to nations like India, China, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico etc. The US economy will be the worst hit due to ongoing direct and indirect outreach of this pandemic.
Image Source: HBR
The US Businesses, right from SMBs to Large enterprises have already starting cutting off jobs. As per CNBC “The upcoming job losses will be unlike anything the US has ever seen”. Some forecasts see April quintupling that or worse. Forecasts for that month range from 500,000 to 5 million.
“There’s just so much that we don’t know about how long the disruption to economic activity related to the containment of the virus will be. That does make forecasting these things very difficult,” said Jeremy Lawson, chief economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments. “By the time you get to the April payroll number, which may be right at the deepest level of contraction, yes, those numbers are plausible certainly.”
And these are the news based on what we all read in media. The reality is even harsher when you learn through your network, that how they are going out of business and how some of them are cutting down on local staff as they can’t afford paying health care of their employees, let alone funding their IT projects anymore which were underway locally.
The opportunities for such businesses lies in outsourcing to nations like India and companies like ISHIR, as they have ensured to keep the lights on amidst lock-down and all the disruption.
Why our clients are unfazed?
ISHIR has not seen any drop offs, except one or two minor cases, who out of panic withdrew services for the time being. The ongoing IT development projects from our small, medium and large clients are going uninterrupted and no one has talked about pulling the plug until now. Clients did ask about the Business continuity plan(BCP) of ISHIR as they did not want to chance their ongoing development work. They are optimistic about post Corona world and they want to be future ready to have an edge over their competitors. They understand the opportunity cost of their upcoming work.
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Why this is the best time to outsource?
Other than the affordability and price advantage, if your cash-flow supports funding your dream project, there could be chances that you may be able to negotiate a better deal with your outsourcing partner due to the negative economic sentiment and lesser closure rate on new business. There could also be a probability that teams will have more bandwidth to innovate and you can also work with flexible and stretched timelines without compromising on the quality or features as you allow more eased timelines.
About Author:
Chetan Saxena is a seasoned Digital Marketer and Chief Operating Officer of ISHIR. He consults businesses on various marketing initiatives as Head of Digital Marketing of Digital Success, a subsidiary of ISHIR and also manages offshore operations of technology side of ISHIR.