Global Capability Centres (GCCs in India)
India is home to a vast number of global capability centres and with a large workforce exceeding a million skilled employees, it accounts for nearly 50% of the global back office workforce. These centres include shared services, engineering and design centres, centres of excellence and digital enablement centres amongst others. Many of them are engaged in business-critical operations that are dependent on uninterrupted business services.
The lockdown and the run up to the lockdown have posed several direct and imminent challenges to the GCCs and their ecosystem. The implications of meeting service level commitments have potentially posed compulsions on the headquarters and parent entities of these centres to consider alternate, hitherto never considered.
Global capability centres are facing the crisis with a comparable set of challenges and grappling with similar mitigation options. Ranging from keeping the lights on, to enabling work from home for a large employee population, the challenges and implications have both been far-reaching. Shortages on mobile computing equipment such as laptops and high compute capacity tablets have been addressed by these organizations in a variety of ways.
Some have engaged in large scale movement of desktops from offices to employee homes. A few have expanded virtual machines with corporate IT security policies applied to personal computing devices. Local authorities have lent their hand of co-operation to these organizations in the times of crisis by providing necessary approvals to keep mission critical processes running.
The challenges are far from over, but the response is a clear combination of resolve, will and commitment on part of organizations, their employees and the Government alike.
We assess the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on GCCs in the Financial Services (FS) sector, mitigation steps that are being taken and share strategies adopted by industry players to meet this crisis.