A study of outsourcing of premedia services to India by US companies

Offshore outsourcing continues to gain prominence as the printing industrystrides into the future. With different segments of the industry looking at reducingcosts and, in exchange providing value-added services, more companies turntowards outsourcing services offshore as a solution. Although it is still unclearwhether companies stand to gain from outsourcing offshore in the long-term, atpresent it is believed that sending parts of labor offshore provides companieswith the much-needed opportunity to focus on their core businesses in addition torealizing monetary gains.The Premedia segment of the printing industry comprises several differenttypes of work that take place prior to specifying the media used for output.Certain Premedia services are more likely to be outsourced offshore than areothers. The main aim of this study is to predict which Premedia tasks andservices are more likely to be outsourced, based on an understanding of thenature of the work involved. In their book, The New Division of Labor: HowComputers are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane(2004) write about the division of labor in today's industries and the kinds of jobsthat are considered to be good candidates for offshore outsourcing. They state that rules-based work, which involves minimal complexities andmisunderstandings, are the right choice for offshore outsourcing.The objectives of this research are:1. To analyze the differences between the theory and the practice ofoutsourcing of Premedia tasks and services.2. To present Premedia labor division models.These objectives are attained by considering the following research question: Arethe types of Premedia work that lend themselves to offshore outsourcing rules based?This is exploratory research which identifies sixty-eight individual tasks inPremedia and categorizes them as fully automated, rules-based, or patterns-based.This is done through a study of relevant literature, observations, andpersonal judgments. The researcher concludes that, in Premedia, the types ofrules-based work that are performed on digital material are theoretically morelikely to be outsourced offshore. To support or refute this statement, theresearcher conducted two interviews with Premedia services providers in India.The findings are that rules-based work is not the only type of work that isoutsourced offshore. The varying levels of complexities associated with differenttypes of work resulted in the researcher being able to predict that, even thoughrules-based Premedia work performed on digital material is most suited to beoutsourced offshore, there is also patterns-based Premedia work that aremoderately suited and least suited to be outsourced offshore.