Why Outsourcing Data Management and Biometrics to India?

Oct 1, 2010 by Clinovo    No Comments    Posted under: Business Best Practices

At the turn of the millennium, IT outsourcing became very popular. India quickly became the main beneficiaries of this growing trend. Companies were indeed attracted by the rich pool of motivated English-speaking talent at a competitive price. Industry leaders like Bill Gates and Jack Welch were among the first to strike strategic alliances with Indian companies and opened a world class technology centre in Bangalore, India.

Outsourcing took a few years to reach the pharma industry. This is explained by the necessity to run clinical trials on the market the drug is developed for. However, the price of bringing a new drug to market costs on average $1 billion, the bulk of the cost being devoted to human clinical trials. To decrease rising costs, big pharmas started leveraging the Indian population for early phases of clinical trials. Although providing untested drugs to a developing country population creates ethical issues, this trend has continued accelerating.

In our business of supporting clinical trial data, outsourcing is even more recent.

Time difference, communication difficulties, and the lack of experience of the outsourcing firm can easily adversely affect your business.  I still believe however, that some level of outsourcing, if done correctly, can give you an extra edge against the competition and I would like to share some advice based on our outsourcing experience at Clinovo.

Why outsource?

Cost savings – Although Indian rates have been through significant increases over the last 10 years, they continue to be lower than US workers, management and communication overhead excluded.

Core Business – Outsourcing part of the operational activity in India enables our teams to concentrate on strategic decisions, to focus on the company’s core business and value-added activities, to spend more time on innovation.

Domain expertise – As I explained previously, India offers a rich pool of talented individuals, especially in engineering and IT. Indian Institutes of Technology are indeed well recognized worldwide.

Scalability – Outsourcing in India enables to be reactive when facing a sudden increase of activity or to handle a temporary decrease in production without affecting the local US workforce.

Are your outsourcing or planning to outsource? What are your thoughts, experience or what lessons have you learnt?

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