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Adith Charlie

Mumbai, Nov. 27 The terrorist attack on the country’s financial capital has not impacted the services rendered by outsourcing firms as work at their delivery centres- located at least 30 km from the epicentre of the crisis- continues unhindered.

Even if the current crisis worsens, off-shoring firms are confident that their customers will not be impacted; vendors say that they can move their customers’ processes to other cities within the country in a span of hours.

Most IT & BPO companies have their delivery centres in places such as Mahape, Malad and Andheri which are in the suburbs of Mumbai. This terrorist attack was largely focused on the Southern part of Mumbai. Moreover, local trains – which are considered to be the lifeline of the city - were largely unaffected by the stand off between terrorists and the security establishment. Though people were apprehensive of using public transport, employee turnout was quite high.

About 80 per cent of the employees of mid-tier company Hexaware Technologies turned up for work in the morning shift. “During the course of the day, this figure improved as employees kept coming in. Hence, none of our delivery operations were impacted,” a Hexaware spokesperson

Three offices of IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in South Mumbai remained closed on Thursday. “We do not provide services to clients from these three centres,” a company spokesperson said. TCS has at least three more offices in Mumbai. Moreover, employees from these three offices in South Mumbai were either asked to work from home or from the company’s other offices in the city, the spokesperson said.

BPO companies such as Firstsource Solutions had asked several of its employees working in the night shift to stay back for the morning shift fearing low turn out of employees. However, absenteeism was not as bad as the company expected it to be as public transport was largely functional, Firtsource’s spokesperson said. Firstsource has delivery centres in Malad (Mumbai).

Since a majority of companies in Mumbai were closed, IT firms that garner a large chunk of business from the domestic markets had a fairly lean day.

“Eighty per cent of our customers were not working today. Hence, we encouraged our employees to leave home early,” said Mr Atul Hemani, Managing Director, Omnitech Infosolutions.

Some domestic companies are expected to remain closed tomorrow too as the terrorists had not been apprehended till the time of going to press. Moreover, there were many rumours doing the rounds suggesting chances of more attacks in the city.

Customers generally have a business continuity engagement with their vendors, which would ensure them to get the same work done from other centres in the country. This ensures that the customers IT programme is not impacted even in a crisis situation such as aterror attack, flood or any other natural or man made calamity

“We can move the processes to say Chennai in half an hour or in a day. It depends on what is provided for in the agreement,” said Mr V. Ramanan, global delivery head for Hexaware Technologies

A spokesperson for Firtsource said: “We generally move the work to other centres in case of a crisis. If the volumes are high for our other centres to accommodate the calls would either go to other vendors or to the in house operations of clients themselves.”

More Stories on : Outsourcing | Terrorism

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