Offshore R&D Center of Excellence: Myth or Reality

Many of our customers envision a Center of Excellence at the offshore center during the initiation of their offshoring initiative. Even though the intent is right, many companies don’t succeed in their attempt to set up the offshore center of excellence. We have analyzed the reasons in details. Here are the top 3 reasons for the failure of COEs:

• Companies don’t plan on the projects and want to decide on the projects based on the capability of the people they are able to hire at the offshore location.
• The key driver for starting the India center is cost for most of the companies, so whenever there is attrition at the onsite location, they refill those positions in the offshore location. This doesn’t allow the offshore location to plan on building expertise in a certain area.
• The senior management team is not committed to the COE concept or has not spent the time to get the buy in from all the stakeholders involved in the project.