Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 10.7
Human robots? Computers track every movement of workers filling customers'
orders and direct them to take the most efficient walking route at this Amazon warehouse in
England.
galore, in particular, has made an effort to become the Silicon Valley of India. Companies
use Indian companies to write software, process credit card applications, and do billing.
Texas Instrument's chip design team in Bangalore has 200 patents to its name. Hewlett-
Packard and Oracle both have thousands of employees in India. SAP has 500 engineers
in Bangalore.
Multinational teams allow a company to have people at work more hours during
the day. It becomes easier to have a call support center open 24 hours a day. It is even
possible for projects to be shuttled between multiple sites, allowing around-the-clock
progress to be made on time-sensitive products. For example, a team in Palo Alto can
spend its day finding bugs in a piece of software, then hand the bug reports over to a
team in Bangalore that spends
its
day fixing the bugs [42].
However, the main attraction of India is cost savings. Wages in India are substan-
tially lower than in the United States or Western Europe. The total cost of an Indian
computer programmer is about $20,000 a year. Companies say they need to lower their
expenses in order to stay in business. If they go out of business, their US employees will
lose their jobs. Hence creating multinational teams is a way for companies to stay in
business and preserve jobs in the United States [43].
Creating multinational teams has disadvantages, too. The principal disadvantage is
that the infrastructure in less developed countries can make business more difficult. For
example, because India has only two international airports—one in New Delhi and the
other in Mumbai—it is hard to travel to and from Bangalore. The highway system in
India is primitive, and electrical power is unreliable.
