Offshoring and Outsourcing to INDIA

The company, an avionic company with a high share of equipments in a lot of aircrafts, was very successful in winning new projects for the A380. But very soon we recognized, we can not find the skilled engineers needed, in Germany nor as contractors (engineers with time limited contracts) in Europe. So, what to do? We analyzed our projects, the most critical situation was within the software department, and identified along with the development phase core and non-core-competencies. As we had to develop level A software, software which is critical for the operation of a system - like a flight control system, we had to spent a lot of manpower for testing activities. So we defined activities related to verification and validation - mainly unit testing as none core competence, as an activity which can be outsourced or offshored. We looked to India - a country with a lot of well educated engineers, with attractive hourly rates, with encouraged young people and non limiting working contracts contrary to Germany - at this time we had the 35 hrs / week contract basic rule defined by the Unions.