Case study: Echo India business process outsourcing

Background

When Integrated Water Services Water Hygiene (IWS WH) conducts a Legionella risk assessment, it includes a schematic drawn up in CAD format and sent to the client.

In 2018, IWS WH was using a third-party supplier to produce the CAD drawings, however the turnaround time for this was becoming increasingly longer, sometimes taking from four to five weeks to produce.

This had a knock-on effect, not only on delivery but also business processes. IWS WH was not able to invoice the client until the CAD drawing had been supplied for inclusion in the client's risk assessment report.

Solution

Karen Carter, Head of Central Services for IWS WH, consulted with Echo’s People Team to look at outsourcing this function through the team in India.

At the time, there was no one employed by Echo India skilled in using CAD.

Karen wrote a brief of the requirements and Echo sourced suitable candidates for interviews, which Karen was involved in – interviewing candidates on MS Teams.

Two candidates were selected, and Karen worked with the team to train and implement the new process in India.

Part of this was recreating symbols that were used in these drawings, but which the third-party supplier had copyrighted. The Echo India team used international standards to create symbol templates.

Benefits

• Efficiency | The Echo India team work on a 48-hour (two-day) turnaround for all CAD drawings
• Greater control | Moving work to Echo India took four-five months, moving across region by region as the team’s ability and capacity grew
• Scalability | The original team of two is now a team of six people
• Cost | IWS WH paid the third-party per drawing while they pay per head for the resource in Echo India; the resulting cost saving is approximately 50%

If outsourcing one or more business processes could benefit your business, email ask@echo-ms.com with a brief overview of your requirements.