by ADAM GIFFORD
While the official strategy is to target Britain, the Outsource2NZ initiative of the Auckland office of British firm Mi Services is finding fertile fields in the United States.
Managing director John Quirk said there are clear advantages for New Zealand companies in the US.
"The West Coast is easy because the time difference is relatively minor," he said. "The middle is easy because all the people with good skills have gone to Silicon Valley or Microsoft."
Mi Services has carved out niche businesses with its SCORWizard supply chain consulting tool and with its expertise in the Ross Systems enterprise resource planning product, which it used to sell.
Ross is strong in process manufacturing and is widely used in the steel industry.
Mi Services has completed several projects at Wisconsin-based Charter Steel, including supplying level two support for the Ross ERP.
Charter Steel information services director Tony Bares said Mi Services was initially brought in to help roll out Ross into a second mill the company bought near Cleveland.
It then integrated Charter Steel's shopfloor real-time manufacturing application with the ERP, taking away the need to manually input production data and eliminating the human error which comes with re-keying data.
It has also fine-tuned the order entry and planning processes, allowing the company to get more value from its ERP investment.
The US is undergoing a surge in outsourcing, with research firm Forrester estimating 830,000 service sector jobs will be sent to low wage countries like India, China and Russia by the end of next year, and 3.4 million jobs will be gone by 2015.
It said debate over the practice during the presidential election campaign was helping to accelerate the trend as companies experimented.
Bares said Charter Steel looked at Indian vendors, but none had sufficient experience with Ross technology.
"There were Indian vendors interested in learning to do it, but when we really started to look we discovered we would need a middle man to communicate between us and them, and it was no longer such a cheap resource," he said.
"With the Mi Services guys, we don't need a middle man. I feel confident in saying the Mi Services people have more knowledge of the tool than the ones I have dealt with at Ross."
He said the time differences and distance were not problems.
Mi Services practice manager Pete de Heer said trust was the most important part of outsourcing.
Auckland branch of company reaps US harvest
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