Outsourcing is becoming more popular as companies realise the cost benefits of allowing another company to manage a specific area of their business. This could be anything from outsourcing calls, to IT services, to HR and health and safety. Recently there has been a lot of media coverage about the cost advantages of outsourcing, with councils such as Gloucester City Council saving £220,000 a year by outsourcing some of its revenue and benefits services.

Outsourcing is different from other relationships in the business world in that there is usually some form of contractual relationship and quite often some geographic distance. It is important to compensate for these barriers by completing necessary work and taking sufficient care of the relationship.

Finding a Vendor

Finding the right outsourcing company is important, and even more important is maintaining and evaluating this relationship.

The vendor selection process should be well thought out. A decision based on entirely on lowest price may be a decision that is regretted a few months down the line. When choosing an outsourcing company, compose a list of desired criteria as it is easy to forget key factors amongst the stress. Conduct interviews to be sure the vendor meets the criteria set out. Suggested areas of criteria:

Price – does the vendor meet your budget?
References/reputation – Does the vendor have a portfolio of successful clients; are they proven in what they do? Are they willing to provide testimonials or references from clients past and present.
Location – Is the outsourcing company located locally? Are you or the outsourcing company able to travel to hold meetings? If not, are there other forms of communication which will enable you to maintain regular contact?
Contract terms – What are the contract terms? Do you need a flexible contract? Make sure contract terms are clear
Resources – What resources does the outsourcing company have to meet your needs? How many members of staff will be working on your project, is this sufficient?
Commitment to quality – Ensure your outsourcing company are proven to be committed to maintaining the high quality standards that are expected.
Value – How will the company be able to add value?
Expertise – A good outsourcing company has gained expertise over the years, having worked with clients with similar business and have gained experience in facing challenges. Find out about the vendors expertise, ask about challenges they have faced and how they were overcome.

Setting Requirements

Company requirements are a priority and a professional outsourced company will be willing and able to adapt and alter as business requirements indeed change over time. Therefore continually evaluating the business relationship is essential; is it continuing to provide the right service? Is it meeting all necessary needs and objectives? Is there a conflict of interest? Is the service still cost effective and worthwhile? A good outsource company will be able to adapt their services to these changes to ensure the services still meets your needs.

When specifying requirements, it is important for remember key principles. Firstly, be absolutely clear on all requirements as if there is a chance something in the writing could be misunderstood, it may cause problems in the future. Be sure to ask your outsource company if all requirements are clear and understood.

To ensure there are no ambiguities, be sure to ask a wide range of people their interpretation of the final requirements outline before agreeing with the vendor. There should be no room for assumption in the requirements and remember it is better to write too much than too little. The requirements process can be a lot more demanding and time consuming than other business processes due to the physical differences in an outsourcing relationship. However, this initial time spent will hopefully mean there is no time spent correcting misunderstandings in the future.

Source: Noobpreneur

Putting U.S. astronauts aboard private spacecraft originally was intended to accelerate the pace and slash the cost of manned exploration. But now, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are debating whether the plan’s main goal should be fostering jobs to stimulate the economy.

Tension between boosting science or the economy erupted during a meeting earlier this year at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Addressing a group of high-level outside advisers, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver emphasized that the primary aim of outsourcing cargo and crew transportation to private industry is to promote thousands of high-tech jobs.

Alarmed, aerospace experts on NASA’s safety panel shot back that the program’s direction should remain focused on long-standing engineering and performance criteria: building rockets and capsules able to reliably reach Earth’s orbit. Critics of the agency say moves to play down short-term transportation goals in favor of broader economic stimulus are clouding the future of U.S. human spaceflight and raising questions about safety.

The disputes are heating up as closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, prepares to launch on Saturday the first privately developed cargo capsule designed to dock with the international space station. The White House hopes to capitalize on such commercial initiatives—and NASA’s projections of resulting job growth—as another high-profile bid to boost the economy.

Emphasizing job creation is hardly novel for NASA, which during the Cold War began spreading facilities and payrolls across many states partly as a strategy to lock in congressional support for big-ticket items. Contractors working on space shuttles, unmanned rovers and other projects routinely trumpeted the employment such contracts meant for specific states or regions.

The administration of former President George W. Bush promoted outsourcing cargo deliveries to privately built and operated vehicles. Under President Barack Obama, NASA also has championed using commercial spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit. But the agency now emphasizes the employment benefits of privatizing space flight after initially stressing that those vehicles would be developed faster and at lower cost than traditional programs.

Thursday, during a conference call, Ms. Garver said proposed private vehicles would “truly open up space to more people and activities” and “create high-quality jobs…in America.”

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, compares today’s budding commercial-space initiatives to the early days of the Internet, which he says “originally was regarded as a government entity” until entrepreneurs revved up growth with myriad applications. NASA’s latest emphasis on fostering jobs “clearly has been led from the top,” he says, “and the American public is waking up to the shift.”

In an interview, Ms. Garver called the exchange at the January meeting “worthwhile” and not acrimonious. Others familiar with the session, however, say it was tense and underscored the White House’s altered approach to promoting private manned spacecraft and cargo vehicles. “The momentum clearly is swinging in favor of nurturing the industry taking shape on the ground,” according to former NASA official and industry consultant Charles Miller.

Lawmakers and congressional staffers “have been shocked” by NASA’s sudden “public emphasis on national economic benefits” derived from space spending, according to former Delta Air Lines executive John Marshall, whose term on the advisory group expired after he attended the session with Ms. Garver and her boss, NASA chief Charles Bolden, both Obama administration appointees.

The panel warned in a report that less control over the program could lead to reduced attention to specific safety considerations. Other critics say the evolving rhetoric is an attempt to recast NASA in the context of the presidential campaign. The change “has everything to do with jobs and public relations,” according to James Muncy, a former Republican House staffer who consults for space start-ups. “But it has little to do with concrete achievements in space.”

NASA is pushing commercial solutions in the wake of last year’s retirement of the space-shuttle fleet.Since 2006, it has invested well over $1 billion to help private companies develop manned and unmanned commercial boosters and spacecraft. It has committed a further $3.5 billion to pay for in-orbit cargo deliveries later in this decade. The agency also has proposed spending $800 million annually as seed money for private manned projects, but Congress is balking at that figure.

“I have yet to be convinced that a viable commercial market will develop” for privately built spacecraft, Rep. Ralph Hall (R., Texas), who heads the House Science Committee, said at a hearing this year.

A White House spokesman had no comment. In a statement released in Florida Wednesday, Mr. Obama’s campaign said the president “has laid out a bold new vision for NASA” that seeks a “sustainable program of human space flight” and promises jobs for the state.

The Obama administration has stepped up its support for manned spacecraft known as space taxis despite rising doubts that private companies can deliver them much before 2020, the nominal retirement date for the space station. As the program has fallen behind schedule—with manned missions likely slipping to 2017 at the earliest from late 2015—supporters have changed the way they describe the ultimate benefits.

“We are going to develop a commercial capability for the benefit of the American economy,” Mr. Bolden told lawmakers in March. Rather than dwelling on engineering advances during a February budget briefing, he echoed one of the president’s themes from his latest State of the Union Address, saying the space-taxi program was creating jobs and “helping support an economy that’s built to last.”

NASA’s focus on employment is evident in other ways. Despite shrinking overall resources, the agency seems adamant about retaining all of its major facilities and more than 18,000 employees. “We have no intention to slim down our civil-service workforce,” according to Ms. Garver.

Source: WSJ

Australian organisations’ growing reliance on technology outsourcers has given rise to a new unit within firms that are doing this the best: the Vendor Management Office (VMO).

In recent years, a number of local and international companies have suffered high-profile outsourcing failures in service delivery, project execution and realisation of the expected value.

Vendor management has gained prominence within companies like the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, AMP, Citi, HSBC and AT&T, in recognition that vendors need to be managed throughout an outsourcing relationship, not just when striking or ending a deal.

Analyst firm Forrester reported last year that almost half of companies had established centralised vendor management groups, with an additional 11 percent planning to introduce one that year.

In my experience in the Australian finance sector, firms using multi-disciplinary VMOs have been able to deliver tangible results in customer satisfaction and commercial value, with some driving down costs by ten to 15 percent.

The VMO manages and facilitates contracts across three critical pillars on an ongoing basis, each of which needs a differing set of skills, methods, and processes:

Strategic Relationship – driven by company executives. Aims to understand all parties’ businesses and challenges, and through this, agree on common objectives with shared KPIs.
Service Delivery – governs and monitors project delivery and production support, with any issues escalated appropriately.
Commercial Management – verifies that obligations are being met by both parties and manages contractual consequences, whether they are rewards based on KPIs being met, or penalties for non-delivery.

Unfortunately, there are many pitfalls in setting up a VMO as the skills and capabilities needed are multi-disciplinary, involving specialised legal, commercial, financial and technology competencies.

The task is further complicated by the fact that the VMO needs to traverse multiple internal departments and many supplier relationships, at both operational and strategic levels.

Savvy firms have drawn lawyers, accountants, procurement officers, IT architects and service delivery skills into one unit – either in a virtual or direct manner.

They have up skilled their people not just in the technical competencies of their job family but also in soft skills to navigate relationships, engagements and negotiations.

Balancing commerce and technology

The trick to a VMO is to ensure it is balanced across commercial and technology dimensions.

Too strong a legal/procurement focus may produce contracts that look good economically, but result in poor customer service and suboptimal IT delivery – forcing the IT team to form ‘shadow IT’ to compensate.

On the other hand, a heavy technology bias in the VMO can expose the commercial management to greater levels of financial risk and a task-based approach where accountabilities in delivery become very unclear.

This can lead to a weak legal position for the client from internal IT teams being seen as a potential cause for non-delivery by the outsourcer.

Service providers like Information Services Group (formerly TPI) offer outsourced VMOs, but naturally this only works if the service is independent of other service providers, and can act on behalf of the client organisation in a trusted manner with aligned incentives.

Without a VMO, companies should lean against outsourcing core technology services, and focus on attracting, developing and retaining an in-house technology capability as a core competency for strategic advantage instead.

Clearly, insourcing versus outsourcing is a topic in its own right. Apple, Google, and Amazon are among those retaining strategy, architecture, design and engineering in-house to support innovation and growth that has fundamentally changed the world for us all.

Source: ITNews

Wipro Technologies, the IT, consulting and outsourcing business of Wipro Ltd, will launch its ‘India Gateway’ internship programme for UK university students in July 2012.

According to a press statement, this one-year UK-India collaborative training programme will involve a three-month technology induction course followed by a six-month on-the-job training with Wipro teams. In the last three months, the students will work with live project teams, the statement said.

“Wipro’s talent transformation group has been instrumental in tapping and nurturing over 100,000 talented individuals,” Mr Deepak Jain, Senior Vice-President and Global Head-Work Force Planning, Wipro Technologies, said in the statement.

The selection process for candidates will begin in July 2012 and the first batch comprising 20 students is expected to arrive in India in the second week of September 2012, the statement said.

Source: The Hindu Business Line

The information and communications technology (ICT) industry is shedding jobs despite a skills shortage, trade union Solidarity said on Thursday.

“ICT companies retrench highly skilled employees for various reasons such as employment equity, thereby creating a skills shortage which in turn leads to outsourcing, inflated salaries and recruitment from abroad,” said spokesman Marius Croucamp in a statement.

On Tuesday, black empowered technology group Gijima said it would retrench an undisclosed number of workers to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Gijima would not say how many employees would be affected “due to the consultative HR (human resources) processes that we need to follow”.

The company said it intended reducing staff costs by between eight and 12 percent. This would be completed by mid-August and the business restructuring would come into full effect in July.

Croucamp said Gijima had already retrenched about 200 employees since December and planned to retrench another 200 employees by mid-August.

“Gijima has retrenched approximately 150 permanent employees and 50 contract workers since December,” he said.

The union would meet with Gijima next week to discuss the job losses.

“A number of Gijima employees received a letter yesterday (Wednesday), informing them that a new retrenchment process was in the offing,” Croucamp said.

Solidarity said retrenchments were taking place at the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) and Nokia Siemens Networks.

“Sita’s restructuring process affects approximately 40 percent of its 2200 employees,” Croucamp said.

“Meanwhile, Nokia Siemens Networks is also carrying out large-scale retrenchments in South Africa, Nigeria and Germany. Approximately 160 employees will be affected by the retrenchments.”

Source: iol

THE Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) is confident of sustaining the robust growth of the information technology-business-process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry, and is eyeing an ambitious growth target of 15 percent per annum until 2016.

BPAP Chairman of the Board Alredo I. Ayala said with government support and the fine-tuning of the country’s educational system, the IT-BPO industry can even grow faster, providing the national economy the much-needed boost.

As more and more companies see the need to focus on their core competencies, the country’s BPO industry will remain strong and experience robust growth in the next four years, according to Ayala.

Interviewed by the BusinessMirror during the launch of the BPAP “Careers for Street Kids Program” in Makati City on Wednesday, Ayala said the prospect for the BPO industry remains bright with the tremendous demand for Filipino talents.

Through the three-year program, BPAP and its partners namely, Children’s Hour, Street Kids International and Virlanie aim to take poor but deserving high-school graduates as well as college-level students off the streets by providing them free training for future employment in participating BPO companies.

“The industry is growing quite well. Last year we achieved a 20-percent growth. We are now at $11 billion in [revenue] export with around 60,000 direct employees. This year we see around another 20-percent growth,” Ayala said.

According to Ayala, there is a tremendous amount of demand abroad for Filipino talents, both offering opportunity for voice and nonvoice BPO.

Currently, the government is promoting investments in the IT/BPO, both for voice and nonvoice segments, and the prospects of developing high-end voice and nonvoice BPO is vast, Ayala said.

“We in the industry are trying to develop both voice and nonvoice,” he said, noting of the country’s strength in terms of human resources, with its pool of health, financial accounting and even legal professionals just waiting to be tapped by the IT-BPO industry.

“There’s really a big variety of nonvoice work [for Filipino professionals]. We have a lot of nurses and accountants. And we also have many lawyers,” he said.

BPAP is the umbrella association for the IT-BPO and GIC or Global In-House Center industry in the Philippines.

It serves as the one-stop information and advocacy gateway for the industry. With over 260 industry and support-industry members, including four associations, BPAP plays a pivotal role in sustaining rapid growth of the IT-BPO and GIC industry.

In 2007 BPAP developed a strategic plan for the industry “Road Map 2010” which provided the mission and development goals for the industry. With the government’s support, the IT-BPO industry grew to $9 billion in revenues and 525,000 in employee base in 2010.

To further boost the IT-BPO industry, BPAP has developed the IT-BPO Road Map 2010-2016, which forecast revenues of up to $25 billion and an employee base of 1.3 million by 2016.

This year the industry targets an ambitious $20 billion in revenues, providing 900,000 direct employment to Filipino graduates.

“We can actually grow even faster. We can grow $25 billion in revenues and 1.3 million employees,” he said.

However, Ayala said that the industry’s growth depends on the strong collaboration between the IT-BPO industry, the government and academe.

He said there’s a need for the government to promote investment in the IT-BPO center while focus is needed on the part of the academe to enhance the country’s educational system.

“What we need is to focus on our educational system. The end product should be more employable graduates,” he said.

According to Ayala, closer collaboration is needed with the academe “so that the academe would fine-tune their curriculum as well as training methodologies.”

The Commission on Higher Education, he said, has in fact approved a new curriculum called Service Management, which will add minor 21 units of Service Management subject in the college curriculum, so that students can actually have much better chance of landing a job in BPO companies after college.

According to Ayala, the country’s current customer market for the IT-BPO, companies in the US, the UK and Australia, see the need to focus on their core competencies, which leaves the IT-BPO opportunity for the Philippines wide open.

Possibly, he said, Philippine companies can extend its reach to other countries in Europe, as well as in Asia, but with particular focus on English-speaking countries, underscoring the need to further enhance the quality of education, particularly in oral and written English communication that fits the requirement of foreign companies seeking to outsource business processing.

The BPAP’s and IT-BPO’s ambitious growth target, he said, can be achieved, “only if the Philippines continues to successfully address the Human Resource supply and put in place a favorable regulatory environment for the industry.”

Source: Business Mirror

Mike Game, chief executive of recruiter Hudson Europe, tells Recruiter that specialisation within its UK & Ireland operations, and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), were two key considerations for the business.

“RPO is a growth priority for Hudson in Europe,” he says.

Recruiter pointed out to him the comments of Mark Bull, CEO of Randstad UK, who noted at a recent event hosted by the magazine that the firm only makes money out of “a handful” of its RPO contracts.

At the same event, Russell Clements, CEO of technology recruiter SThree, called RPO “the biggest self-inflicted wound in the history of recruitment”. Clements and Bull were keynote speakers at Recruiter’s event celebrating the success of those companies who made it onto the magazine’s list of the fastest-growing recruiters in the UK.

Nonetheless, Game says: “RPO is a profitable service and Hudson regards the service as attractive for future profitability,” adding that the financial services, FMCG and pharmaceutical industries are areas where Hudson Europe has won significant new business of late.

He also tells Recruiter that the firm’s English businesses were reorganised from centres run on geographical business, to “create national England specialist practices” in a number of different specialties which “enable us to provide deep functional expertise”.

Within these speciality practices, he says that the firm “is also prioritising the growth of our small and medium client base as these clients have historically been underserved by recruitment specialists”.

The company has recently changed its name from Hudson Highland Group to Hudson Global.

Source: Recruiter

With 3.3 million people driving the E-470, a no-cash toll highway outside Denver, it’s not unusual for some of them to gripe about cameras recording the movement of their cars.

But not every aggrieved motorist picks up the phone; some like to express their beefs on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The E-470 Public Highway Authority, which monitors social network chatter almost as closely as it does cars, responds to all those complaints and makes the most of its customer experience management (CEM) system.

“Social media: If you’re not plugging into it, you’re a little deaf,” said Dave Kristick, deputy executive director of the E-470 authority.

Kristick attended the ACCE 2012 conference and expo last week in Seattle. He was one of many call center supervisors there who said they want to avoid the prospect of becoming deaf and blind to the questions and concerns of their customers.

In the last few years, call center managers have gone from viewing social media with hesitation to recognizing its importance in CEM, according to many people interviewed at the expo.

Customer experience management use cases
Many companies have moved beyond the initial use of social media channels to market products and now have call centers communicating with customers through those channels as well — answering general questions and offering a direct contact to customers with specific complaints.

Activision Bizzard, for one, realized it would never know what its customers are thinking if it didn’t go social, according to the video game company’s senior director of customer service, Tim Rondeau.

Young video game players “are our customer base,” he said. “We were forced into [social media]. At first we were not as thoughtful about it, but now we are.”

Each of the company’s 14 game studios has a community manager soliciting customer opinions about games through social media platforms, and Rondeau has a separate team of 10 employees reviewing tweets and other social messages to handle problems.

Still, some companies remain leery about exploring Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and other sites.

Gregg McMullen, the technical strategies leader for the social media tracking software company Radian6, says businesses are placing a wall between traditional customer outreach tools — like telephones — and Web-based social media sites. Companies cite several reasons for not using social media, including firewall issues, routing deficiencies and desktop limitations, McMullen said in a talk at the expo.

But the old school and new school approaches may not be as different as people tend to think, McMullen told the audience. Most businesses work hard to ensure that customers who dial their customer service numbers get an answer, he said, yet many company let tweets go unanswered all day.

The E-470 highway authority uses Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to promote price discounts on transponders or for announcing construction work on the highway. But it also uses Radian6 software to track social chatter about the toll road and respond accordingly.

More than 3.3 million motorists drive the 47-mile-long highway in the metropolitan Denver area. It’s a cash-free toll system, so about 900,000 of those drivers use transponders, while the rest have their license plates tracked by cameras.

Some people will dispute their cars were on the toll road, among other complaints, and will blast their grievances on social networks. The Radian6 program allows the highway authority to track certain keywords, collate any related social comments and route those flagged messages to call center agents, who then contact the customer, Kristick said.

After establishing a connection with customers, the E-470 staff occasionally invites toll customers into the authority’s Aurora, Colo., headquarters to see how the center operates, including a peek at the monitors that capture license plate images. And they get a free lunch.

“Customers talk good and bad. But others see that and react,” Kristick said. “It’s chattering you may have never heard before, but now you do.”

How to connect: Attitudes vary
Jason Curtis spots fewer tweets directed at his company, but he’s still monitoring Twitter. Curtis is the customer service manager for Magazines.com, a Nashville, Tenn., company licensed to sell discounted magazine subscriptions.

When a customer does use social media to relay a problem, Curtis offers his contact information so that the customer will take the conversation out of the public domain and he can take a one-on-one approach.

In his ACCE talk, McMullen urged call center employees to not directly respond to tweets but rather send direct messages, even though some in the CEM field believe a company tweeting detailed responses to problems demonstrates transparency.

Not everyone is at that stage of the game. A few call center managers who attended the ACCE expo recognize the importance of interacting with customers through social media, but they believe the nature of their work limits how much they can say in a tweet.

For instance, Heritage Bank in Tacoma, Wash., has considered getting active in social media but finds that its customers rarely use social media platforms to relay banking issues, said Chad Maiuri, a regional branch manager. “It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of resources if it isn’t getting that end of our clients,” he said.

Similarly, a health care plan in Florida — Physicians United Plan (PUP) — sees no need to monitor the social sphere. Most of the senior citizens under the health plan aren’t using social media, said Martha Agramonte, a customer service manager for PUP. But social media will make sense for PUP in the future as younger generations age, she said.

Source: TechTarget

Butler Public Schools Superintendent Mario Cardinale plans to recommend the outsourcing of the district’s business office and substitute services and the merging of two central office secretarial positions into one at Monday night’s board of education meeting.

Cardinale announced the recommendations during the board’s workshop meeting Wednesday in which he told the board that various committees had spent nearly a year examining the positions and whether the changes should be made for economic and efficiency reasons.

“In all fairness to everyone, it’s time to make a recommendation,” Cardinale said.

In the central office, Cardinale said the superintendent’s secretary position and director of Student Support Services secretary position would be made into one position. Substitute services would be outsourced, which Cardinale said the district may need to go out to bid for the services for.

“We would maintain all current approved substitutes,” he said.

Substitutes would also be paid the same per diem rate as they are currently paid, but Cardinale said the district could see a savings in “people power,” or payroll services associated with the substitutes.

“The people would be working in the same buildings, with the same teachers at the same rate of pay that they currently work at,” he said.

While Cardinale said the district is still considering “alternative options” to be presented along with the recommendations for the business office, he said he also plans to recommend the outsourcing of that office, which would reduce the time the district spends on a business administrator from five days per week to three or three-and-a-half days per week. Cardinale said the office, including secretarial positions, would all be outsourced through the Passaic County Educational Services Commission. The money saved through the outsourcing of the business office could be used for educational purposes.

“The money that is saved…I’m recommending that money be put back into curriculum and technology,” he said.

Cardinale said the district would look at creating curricular advisory positions that would assist in bringing the district closer to state Common Core curriculum standards.

None of the board members asked questions or commented on the recommendations Wednesday. Cardinale said he is planning a visual presentation with cost-savings figures on the recommendations for Monday’s board meeting.

Source: Patch

The international business consultant Tholons revealed in its most recent study; “The 100 best destinations for outsourced operations by 2012,” that San Jose, Costa Rica is considered one of the top 10 emerging cities and ranks number 18 among the best in the world to outsource operations, business and information technology.

Second only to Sao Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, San Jose, Costa Rica was selected as the third best among the Latin countries. Additionally, in the overall global standings, San Jose is ranked 18 among the top 100 places in the world for outsourcing. The study was conducted with extensive research around the world, including cities that are considered to be leaders in Latin and South America.

Tholons noted in their study, that Latin America is emerging as the leading region for the establishment of outsourced service operations in the world and Costa Rica was highlighted for its future potential. This is because Costa Rica offers outstanding human resources and it has specialized high value-added operations, such as shared services in the areas of finance, accounting and information technology as well as emerging entertainment and media operations. The services sector in Costa Rica has been evolving, increasingly offering more sophisticated and value added services and it is well positioned around the world in the high-tech sector.

The study also indicates that during 2011, about 24 service centers were established in Latin America. These positive results arise from the growth of larger markets in the region and because Latin countries provide adequate conditions and competitive global business operations for multinational companies currently operating in the larger global markets, among them, Fortune 500 companies from India.

Costa Rica’s Ministry of Foreign Trade, COMEX, is anticipating that in the coming years India will become a significant source of foreign direct investment. This positive interest is the result of a trade group visit to India led by Minister of Trade, Anabel González in March, 2012. They met with government officials and private enterprises to promote Costa Rica as a business destination as well as to promote trade between India and Costa Rica. According to Costa Rica’s Foreign Trade Corporation, PROCOMER, Costa Rica exported $25 million to India in 2011 and imported $133 million and in 2010, Costa Rica’s exports to India were $76 million with imports of $52 million. According to PROCOMER, the majority of the products traded between the two countries were; timber, computer parts, scrap iron and steel, oil seeds and fruits.

Fortune 500 company, MOTIF, has been operating in Costa Rica since 2010 and it is one of the 24 largest multinational companies from India. Five more of the largest “service sector” Indian firms are currently considering expansion into the Costa Rica market. The companies are attracted to Costa Rica for its proximity and time zone compatibility to the U.S. as well as the quality of human resources and the positive business climate.

Source: News CR