Price Waterhouse To Develop India As Offshore Base
Price Waterhouse (PW) plans to develop India as an offshore base for its projects worldwide.
It is working on a strategy whereby the resource pool and infrastructure of PW India will be used to service global clients. Gordon Ferris, partner, PW Europe and David Cheung, director, PW USA SAP Practice (Western Region), said PW's branches in India will work closely with those abroad in project implementation.
This will be done by the transfer of information (business, technical, personnel, etc) about various projects to PW centres in India. The centres will then implement specific modules of the projects and communicate it to the head office, which will be co-ordinating the project.
Thus, PW India will become a part of PW's global project implementation network and will be able to involve itself in international assignments. This will probably also bring down costs for PW clients and help the company become globally competitive, as Indian labour costs are much lower than those in the West.
PW will be focusing on an alliance with Systems Application and Products (SAP), the leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP), where ONGC and Haldia Petrochemicals are already PW clients.
The PW-SAP alliance will mainly target the financial sector, with banking, insurance and corporate treasury as its target areas.
ERP involves preparing an integrated software to address all business functions, like finance, materials, marketing, process control and human resources. SAP has a high degree of integration and offers complete infrastructure for corporate information processing.
It also has a wide functional reach, with more than 70 modules, and has an efficient transaction processing system.
According to PW sources, the total Indian market size for ERP is about Rs 100-150 crore, of which PW hopes to capture about 30 per cent. SAP, Baan and Oracle are the three leading players in the ERP market. P
W has direct investment of about $3 million in India so far. It is in the final stages of a project for building industry-specific templates, which will serve as a base in project implementation.
The use of these templates will cut costs drastically, as less time will be spent in developing the software for the client.
Also the time taken in project implementation will be reduced as the templates will act as prototype for building the software and the project teams will just be required to tailor the template according to the specific needs of the client.
PW India will act as a sort of template laboratory which will maintain and localise the templates developed abroad. This, PW feels, will help the company maintain its competitive edge.