Prime Time 6, Coursebook mit Audio-CD und DVD

5 International outsourcing In many companies, not all the work is done on site. Some tasks are dealt with by separate companies which get paid for their services. Many companies don’t have their own advertising departments, for example, but pay an advertising agency to design their commercials. Outsourcing or homesourcing? a) Read the two definitions below about two trends in outsourcing work. to outsource !*aUtsC"s? v. To transfer certain business tasks to an external provider in order to rationalise the process and make the business more exible. In other words: “Do what you can do best – outsource the rest.” to homesource !*hEUmsC"s? v. To hire people who work from their home instead of an o£ce with appropriate telephone and internet facilities. is reduces costs as you do not have to pay for o£ce space and homesourcing people usually provide their own equipment. b) Here are two typical scenarios: one for outsourcing and one for homesourcing. Say which example belongs to which definition and explain your choice! Deltawings Airways has made use of the services of a call centre in India for many years now to handle ight bookings and complaints. When customers dial Deltawings’ hotline they are automatically connected to a call agent in Balrampur who attends to their concerns. Recently, however, there have been increasing complaints about the quality of the service. Customers criticised language and dialect barriers that le them frustrated and unhappy. So, Deltawings Airways has decided to put home-based agents on more complex calls where cultural a£nity might be a factor, but to do oshore for other types of calls, to achieve a more balanced level of service. ABC Ltd is an independent garage that sells second hand cars. Due to the increasing competition ABC Ltd has decided to provide a servicing department that oers aer-sales customer service by contacting customers by phone. However, ABC Ltd has acknowledged the existing lack of skills and resources to complete such tasks and would prefer employees to concentrate on their core activity – buying and selling cars. So, ABC Ltd has delegated the management of customer details to a database management service. In addition, they have approached a call centre to handle the process of customer service (contacting customers, courtesy calls, etc.). c) Which other scenarios for outsourcing or homesourcing can you think of? Sourcing global talent in software The German software company SAP designs and programmes individual software solutions for companies like Lufthansa, Volkswagen or Siemens. SAP has outsourced parts of its programming for many years and is at the moment employing one third of its staff outside Germany: about 1,400 engineers in Silicon Valley, about 3,000 engineers in India, about 1,000 in China and 900 in Israel. In an interview with The New York Times , SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann talks about his experience. 1 2 68 Globalisation Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv