TCS Onsite Employees to be sent home

 
"It has been barely three months since I moved here, and we have been asked to present our projects for review," a TCS employee, posted in the US, said. The present mood among onsite employees is that this means a review of the essentiality of the project so as to decide whether it can be moved offshore, benched or done away with.

Candidates joining the IT profession on hopes of becoming global citizens may soon have to motivate themselves differently as data shows IT companies have been moving more employees offshore in the last few quarters that may mean moving more operations home for better margins.

As the chart shows, while differences in the onsite-offshore ratio may not be significant between quarters, there is a noticeable shift from one year to the next. As most IT majors have the capacity to bench resource for when projects come up, they should have no immediate trouble decreasing their onsite count, a TCS employee says. This means that the danger of job cuts is not immediate. TCS has so far followed a 70:30 ratio between its offshore and onsite count.

"It's true that we keep hearing about projects being closed down or sent to India; but it has not happened to my project, which makes me think keeping a project depend only on the relationship we build with the client," a Cognizant employee working in US said.

Announcing their Q2 results recently, Polaris officials said that the company is looking at offshore growth in previously unexplored areas and functions, despite its reasonably strong pipeline of projects in its strongest market–the US TCS employees posted onsite, in US as well as UK, have been asked to present some of their projects for review, so as to decide which ones are capable of being carried out offshore, or done away with "It is a logical outcome, really. At a time when cutting flab is the norm, it makes sense to follow this simple strategy," said KPMG IT advisory head Akhilesh Tuteja.

Frost & Sullivan's ICT practice deputy head Kaustubh Dhavse added, "While the revenue per employee is almost the same onsite and offshore, the cost per employee is lesser offshore, so it gives companies better margins."

For example, a company could get Rs 12,000 of revenue per employee from an onsite location where the cost would be Rs 10,000. But, in the case of offshore model, while the revenue is the same, the cost per employee could come down to Rs 5,000.