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Captive Centers in India : Maximize Business Efficiency with Offshore Captive Center Solutions

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What are Captive Centers

Captive centers, also known as global in-house centers or global capability centers (GCCs) are client-owned, client-operated delivery centers. Global Captive centers typically function in a non-domestic, talent-rich and low-cost location, providing business-critical outcomes directly to the parent company. Initially, these captives provided back-office or customer support, and product innovation or data and analytics support hardly ever took place. Today, offshore captive centers are driving the transformation agenda of their parent organizations. The employees in a global captive center are legal employees of the organization, not the vendor.

A Global Captive Center Can:

– Deliver strategic, cross-functional business capabilities to the enterprise

– Overcome a distributed technology landscape with cross-functional scale and digital capabilities and tools

– Focus on customer and user experience, not just on efficiency

Captive Landscape and Trends

  • Impact of COVID-19

In a recent article, McKinsey reported that offshore captive centers have successfully adapted to pandemic disruptions and have maintained (and even exceeded) service levels. Best-in-class captives have also recovered to their pre-crisis baseline across key metrics — resiliency, business continuity, and productivity/ efficiency.

  • Innovating Innovation

Captives are successfully leveraging talent and workplace diversity in support of enterprise innovation agenda – embedding innovative business and product ideas across company service lines.

From startup led open innovation programs to innovation labs & intrapreneurship programs, captive offshoring is successfully executing on an omnichannel approach for a robust and sustainable foundation.

  • Business Focus

From traditional service delivery centers, captives are now being developed as alternate business locations – complete with business leaders, functional ownership and focus on business impact, competitiveness and differentiation.

The Evolving Captive Landscape in India

A survey by NASSCOM recently found that by 2025, MNCs are likely to set up 500 new Global Captive Centers (GCCs) in India. Until two years ago, the number of such units established annually was around 50. This demonstrates that India’s large talent pool continues to be attractive and grow.

Year

2009

2017

2022

Captive Centres in India

900+

1,100+

1,400+

Employees

3,90,000

8,00,000

13,00,000

Revenue

$10.6 B

$23 B

$33.8 B

Global Captive centers have successfully evolved into enterprise CoE teams for accelerating the technology adoption and enterprise transformation undertaking work in areas including digital, advanced data analytics, mobility, AI/ cognitive & automation.

Captive Center in India

Evolving from Back-office to Global Captive Centers/GCCs

Historically viewed as an attractive source of ‘cost arbitrage,’ the raison d’etre of a Captive center is now changing to one of ‘skills arbitrage’ or ‘intellectual arbitrage,’ with more recent Captives set up to deliver tech skills at scale, and drive product innovation at a cost advantage. Nowadays, Captive Centers or Global Capability Centers can support a range of critical business goals. They serve as ‘centers of excellence’ specializing in areas like data analytics; as product or process innovation hubs; or they perform broader functions using the technology required for hybrid work.

Key Reasons why Enterprises Set Up Offshore Captive Centers

Enterprise talent: The ability to hire and develop best talent for the global enterprise

Business capabilities: Develop, strengthen and scale enterprise centres of excellence in areas such as cloud, mobile, RPA, AI and Analytics.

Productivity: Captive offshoring/GCC model is 20%-25% more productive over the traditional outsourcing model.

Strategic capacity: Develop capacity and scale to accelerate execution around enterprise strategic priorities

Innovation: Leverage start-up ecosystem and best practices to drive open innovation programs

Expense savings: Captive offshoring/GCC model offers 15%-20% additional savings over traditional outsourcing

Captive Centers

Conclusion

Global Captive centers have a tremendous opportunity to play a more strategic role for their enterprises. Making this shift calls for collective efforts from the enterprise and the leadership team at the offshore captive center to align the goals and operational priorities for the captive center and manage the constraints of growing complexity and a traditional back-office mindset.

 

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