As Cost Pressures Mount, Offshoring Is Making the Work Go Round
...10 years from now, is what would we do during a national crisis if we couldn’t produce engineering maps here?" asks Photo Science’s Meade.
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Federal offshoring legislation that has progressed farthest is in a bill originally set to retaliate against World Trade Organization sanctions. Offshoring language, added by Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), would ban federal contracts to firms that offshore and require states to certify that federally funded work is done here. It passed the Senate but has not yet been touched by the House.
"Protectionist themes scare me to death," said one executive at a May meeting of the American Council of Engineering Companies. "We can’t get too uptight about protecting our own interests."
Regulatory unknowns and diverse offshoring opinions among engineers have made it tough for industry groups such as ACEC to take a stand. The American Society of Civil Engineers failed to consider a position paper at a board meeting in late July in Seattle. Any decision making now will have to wait for ASCE’s annual convention in Baltimore in October.
"There are a lot of international issues we don’t want to slight," says Lehman, chairman of ASCE’s professional policy committee. "We want deliberate, transparent methodology."
| Software Vendor Hopes Indian Roots Will Nourish Enterprise Broadband communications make global offshoring a compelling idea, but turning notions into functioning enterprises can be very hard. NetGuru Inc., the Yorba Linda, Calif., vendor of STAAD/Pro structural design and analysis software, hopes to parlay its Indian roots and its software development and technical support offices there into an offshoring success story.
"Many have entered into offshoring, but not many have figured out how to do it," says Santanu Das, netGuru’s vice president of technology strategy and the U.S.-born son of its founder, chairman and CEO Amrit Das. "You’ve got to have offices in India and a presence in the U.S. We have both and we actually own the software. Our barrier to entry is small." NetGuru launched a "business process offshoring initiative" for structural steel detailing last year with four shops in India heavy with engineers trained in that discipline and a dedicated high-speed data link it already owned. "We have a direct pipe that connects our U.S. and Indian offices," says 31-year-old Das. "We don’t have to fight for bandwidth." The firm uses its own software and collaboration tools but also has formed partnerships and integration links with FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, Calif., for enterprise content management, and with two engineering software vendors to round out services: LARSA Inc., Melville, N.Y. and Tekla, a Finnish developer of 3D engineering software. Das, an MIT-trained structural engineer, says netGuru’s English-speaking engineers in India "are an equal part of the team" who take classes in India to perfect regional American accents and periodically rotate to the U.S. for training. While competition in India has elevated the firm’s low turnover rates, "we like to pay our people a premium salary," Das says. "Typically, a good engineer in Delhi or Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) earns $500 to $700 a month." Maintaining a 24-hour-a-day operation is not easy. Indian engineers demand premiums to work overnight shifts, says Das. But stakes are high. Like many software developers, netGuru, traded on NASDAQ (NGRU), has had rough quarters recently. NetGuru say it has 4,600 clients in the U.S., but Das chafes over growing anti-offshoring laws. "Texas may ban offshoring, but it doesn’t mind a firm from Illinois winning a job and giving work to employees there. How does that help the Texas economy?" he asks. Some customers are enthused. "We may have a tiger by the tail," says Ewen Dobbie, vice president of Dowco Consultants Ltd., a Burnaby, B.C., steel detailer. "The lure of lower rates is undeniable and there is a growing shortage of detailers. That's why companies like netGuru can survive and thrive." |
