Tathya Dot Com Pvt. Ltd.

Vip Road, Kolkata, West Bengal

A crucial challenge for enterprises - both big and small - in an increasingly globalized economy is to manage corporate changes quickly and successfully. While 9 out of the top 10 barriers to successful corporate change programmes can be traced to people related causes, rapid incorporation of disruptive technology into the mainstream business arena forms a core pre-cursor to a need for change in the first place. Thus the battle of managing change effectively is more than half won by properly managing the technology that drives the enterprise. A modern enterprise typically consists of hundreds of business processes. Some of these are core to the enterprise's basic sphere of activity. A lot others are just generic processes that have nothing to do with the enterprise's core competences. While the enterprise can remain very agile in it's core competence areas and can respond to changes in technology in a timely fashion, it can become difficult - if not almost impossible - to maintain the same agility and flexibility in all the other non-core areas. One of the most effective ways to handle this kind of business risk is to outsource certain functions of the business entity to an outside organization that specializes in providing this kind of services to multiple such businesses. This way the business that provides the service becomes a Business Process Provider for that particular business function and this becomes their core competence. Areas of Change: The areas where disruptive technologies can sow the seed of change can be broadly classified into the following four categories: -- Non-core business processes that are strictly rule based transaction processing. -- Non-core processes that require high domain knowledge in the concerned business process area. -- Core business processes that have low domain knowledge requirements and can be modelled as pure transaction processing. -- Core processes that require high domain knowledge. The non-core activities of an organization typically become good candidates for outsourcing to other organizations that are more prepared to handle them properly and insulate the primary organization from the effects of disruptive technological innovations. The core functions are best kept inside for obvious reasons. The core functions are an organization's raison-d-etre and may not really make sense to outsource to another organization. Changes in Core Areas: As noted above, an organization will be consistently more agile in handling disruptive technologies within their core competence areas than in their non-core areas. For example, consider a printing shop. When digital printing entered the market as a disruptive force, all serious printing shops adapted to the new methods pretty quickly. But, most of these same shops would take months if not years to implement a cutting-edge accounting package. And even if they implement, it will probably be nothing short of a nightmare for them to upgrade to a newer version of the system! In many cases, even some of the core functions that a business performs can become good candidates for outsourcing. This occurrs when a significant part of the core activity work-flow can be formulated as strict rule based transaction processing steps. Such processes can well be outsourced to another organization to reduce and control low skill level human resource within the organization. Changes in Non-core Areas: With the global acceptance of internet as a valid means of business communication and with the recent advances in security solutions relating to internet communications, it is becoming increasingly easier for organizations to send out their non-core, IT oriented processes to a shared service provider. A shared service provider will typically be an IT company or an IT Organization within a larger entity who possess core competence in the field of IT and who have acquired key business process expertises either through direct acquisition or partnering with other business process experts. The IT Organization within the Shared Service Provider company builds and then maintains the IT infrastructure that helps in service delivery by the business process experts group. This IT infrastructure can be dedicated on a per client basis or even could be shared between smaller clients so as to result in significant cost savings for all of them. Either way the client company benefits from the fact that their IT and IT based non-core activities are being handled by people whose core business is IT and the concerned business functions - say, Accounts Receivable (AR) for instance. Hence this organization will be more prepared and agile enough to quickly cope with any disruptive surges in the IT segment and take advantage of any technological advances in the business function areas - say, some new technology that makes AR processing easier. How Tathya Can Help: Tathya with its core competence in IT and Software Development area has been following the Offshore Outsourcing model for the IT Organization right from its inception in 1997. This has given the company a chance to learn to mitigate the pains of outsourcing to a great extent through effective planning and consultative support to its clients. Additionally, Tathya has developed core profeciencies in a number of Business Process areas through selective hiring of competent human resource and through partnering with local business and financial consultants. This makes the company prepared to provide end-to-end business process outsourcing services to its clients.

An efficient, reliable and secure IT system is essential for any business. Staff, suppliers and customers are all dependent upon it to provide quality services. Hence in today's service culture, IT service management has and should become a priority. IT systems are growing increasingly complex and require a greater depth and diversity of skills to maintain and manage them. These can be challenging and costly to both acquire and retain. Outsourcing IT service management is widely recognized as a strategic tool to bring new efficiencies, better performance and greater return on investment. We have defined processes to manage outsourced services efficiently and professionally. We follow the widely accepted ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) approach to IT service management which provide a set of best practices. The components of our service management process are: SERVICE LEVEL REQUIREMENTS (SLR) - Defining your Service Level Requirements (SLR) is the first step. Our predefined template will help you to properly cover all the necessary issues required for your organization's service needs. SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT (SLA) - The Service Level Agreement (SLA) is the core to the outsourcing operation. Our SLA template contains an extensive draft of a complete service level agreement. You can accept each clause 'as is' or can edit to cover any of your specific need. SERVICE TRANSITIONING PLAN - We prepare a comprehensive outsourcing plan, which is the guide for the transfer of client's work and knowledge to our environment in a timely and efficient manner. SERVICE QUALITY ASSURANCE PLAN - All the outsourced IT services pass through our stringent Quality Assurance Plan before any delivery. Our dedicated Quality Assurance cell is responsible for the quality of service delivery following a true six sigma process. SERVICE QUALITY AUDIT - Our well researched template designed to audit and review service levels and service management will help you to continually assess and improve the service quality. This can be applied against any of your existing service, supplier or any other third party outsourcing companies.

With disruptive technologies inundating the market at a pace that is unprecedented in the history of mankind, threat to established businesses losing their competetive edge becomes all the more accentuated. However, it is probably not coincidental that in Chinese the symbol for Change also means Danger and Opportunity (Ref: http://cor-ex.com/ManChal/mcCrpChg1.htm)! It really does summarize the situation incredibly well. When there's a disruptive technology entering the market, it brings with itself a set of threats to the established order as it does a slew of opportunities to the venturesome. Now or Never: The managerial dilemma at each such watershed, is whether to meet the threat head-long and convert it to an opportunity rightaway or to wait and see. Both these extreme solutions are however not optimum (Ref: http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/management/internet-commerce.php). One might end up waiting for too long or burn one's fingers trying to do something that is not yet ready for prime-time. In the modern high-speed internet age, the time dimesion on the graph-sheet has been squeezed out of recognition. Traditional years have been suddenly squeezed into months if not days. This makes the challenge of taking the right decision at the right epoch all the more heightened. A Middle Path: In such situations, corporate managers often need a middle path. They need a way to court the new-comer without offending the old-faithful. Pretty challenging task indeed! Trying to do this with the existing enterprize resources and within the organizational structure of the ancien-regime has proved quite challenging for the managers that have tried their hands at the game, all over the world. It's difficult to move out of the 'well managed' mode for an established corporation. Ironically, this is one of the core reasons that an established corporation that is 'too well managed' can often fail to make the better of a disruptive opportunity! The Offshore Outsourcing Solution: The best course of action in a situation like this is almost always to hire an outside organization to tackle the disruptive technology through research and custom development. Doing it through offshore resources in low wage countries like India, further offers a very significant cost advantage and keeps the 'investment in the unknown' to a rock bottom level. However, you must choose your development partner very carefully. You must recognize that you will need to work with people that talk a different language (although most companies that engage in offshore outsourcing will have staff that speak, write and understand English well), are from a different culture, may have a completely different set of standards for professional behaviour and last but not least will be working completely different hours than yours! Why Choose Tathya: Because we have been there and Done it! For the last eight years we have been helping global business managers finding a way out of the disruptive quagmire and partnering with venturesome entrepreneurs trying to edge their way into the marketplace with innovative and highly disruptive business ideas. We have helped them keep their costs of development low, provided them with a sounding board for their - often - wildly imaginative ideas, curbed their over-enthusiasm without killing innovation, worked closely with them at an intellectual level to make their ideas more meaningful, offered to understand their pain points and suggest ways and means to solve them. The benefits of outsourcing custom development projects to Tathya can be summarized as: Technical and functional edge over the competition Faster development cycles Strong backend operating environment Access to skilled manpower Better support Lower cost At Tathya, we are capable of and have experience in successfully developing application softwares in the following areas: Innovative Web Application Development and Deployment Innovative Desktop Application Development and Support Mobile application development Real Estate Software Development (Including MLS integration) E-commerce solutions ERP/CRM and Workflow Optimization Applications Development Website design and Development We rely on our proven distributed software development methodology which includes the following components: Requirement generation Requirement analysis and estimation Software design Software development Software testing and validation Software deployment and delivery Software Release management Software Change management Software maintenance Excellent communication channel

In any organization, the IT (Information Technology) departments are facing continuous pressure to deliver new applications besides adopting new technologies. Whereas, studies show that 60-70% of departmental resources are always engaged in maintaining the existing applications only creating a serious time constraint to take up any new initiative. So to overcome this problem, Application Maintenance outsourcing is widely accepted as an effective strategy. For years we are effectively providing maintenance services to our clients through our well defined process. We provide the clients captive IT teams complete with Project Managers, System Designers, Testers and Developers. The maintenance process is monitored by Service Level Agreement (SLA) to handle the following: Adaptive Maintenance Preventive Maintenance Corrective Maintenance Continuous changes in the business processes and technologies always force the maintenance staff to change and enhance the application. Our Adaptive Maintenance process always enhance the client application so as to enable it to respond correctly to the evolving business and technological needs. Our Preventive Maintenance process continually test the client application so as to detect any inherent defects and thereby remove them to prevent any future problem. We also prepare and maintain various check-lists for routine performance evaluation and maintenance of the system. The results are higher availability, better performance, higher user satisfaction and overall cost reduction. Our Corrective Maintenance process quickly and effectively solve any problem reported through the process of Request Management Incidence Management Root Cause Analysis

Organizations are increasingly facing problems in maintaining their age old legacy systems because of their huge size, logical complexity and technological obsolete scent. Hence it is becoming essential to transform them to the latest technologies that provide greater business flexibility, better maintainability and lower TCO. In such scenarios, often there are multiple applications with overlapping functionality. At Tathya, we reengineer your existing applications to improve their value. In doing so we also take care to retain or even enhance their functionality so that they surely exceed existing performance level. We are accustomed to work within strict time schedules so the outsourcer can rest assured about meeting specified deadlines. We have the ability and experience in reengineering an application source code to determine the functionalities and then compare them with the current requirement and suggest the best solutions. We work with very flexible timings to make ourselves available at our client's business hours and use various sorts collaboration tools to maintain a very effective client communication. Our Applications Reengineering services features and benefits include: Effective reengineering your legacy application Proven expertise in extracting business logic from legacy systems Rapid transformation of your legacy application to contemporary platform Enhancing value of your application Expertise in contemporary technologies like .NET, J2EE, UNIX and Linux

Data Entry and Processing service is an important category under IT Enabled Services. The service include capture, digitization and processing of data remained in various sources like manually filled forms, printed documents, images, videos, sounds etc. The output also can be given in diverse media like database on servers, hard copy, cd-rom etc. as per client's requirement. Organizations are benefited by outsourcing data entry activities as they can save office space, manpower, management headache, but get timely and quality output from experienced and skilled workers. We at Tathya have expertise and knowledge to handle most complex projects. We not only execute data entry services, but also offer innovative and customized solutions for your requirements. We internally develop helper tools by our in-house developer team to supplement the operators' work, quality assurance and processing of data. Thus we make the job more efficient and accurate. Also our operators can input any type of data. Our state of the art facility with high internet band width and dedicated pool of project managers, programmers and operators is an ideal choice for outsourcing data entry projects. Here are some of the data entry services which we are capable of providing: Form data entry Word processing Audio transcription Online data entry Data entry from image files Web data capture Inbound mail data capture Cash, credit & check processing We are always able to deliver our clients quality and accurate data as our work goes through stringent quality check process.

Now-a-days, a strong knowledge management system is one of the key factors behind the success of an organization. Data and document conversion is the primary component for a knowledge management system. However handling document conversion by the company itself is neither easy nor productive. Hence it is always profitable to outsource large volume of document conversion jobs to competent outsourcing company. We posses state of the art facilities both in respect of infrastructure and manpower for outsourcing any document conversion project. We use various conversion tools for the conversion of electronic data from its present format to the desired format. We also use customize in-house software in such conversion processes. We have experience and expertise in the following areas: Document extraction from virtually any format OCR cleaning Indexing Generate output in any format like SGML, XML, HTML, Word RTF etc. Any DTD, any schema, any specification Content tagging We accept documents through either ftp, CD or DVD, paper stack or any other format. Our working process can be summarized as per the following: We review your sample document We prepare specifications as per your requirement We prepare samples You review specifications and samples We refine specifications and samples till you approve We develop in-house tools for automation at various levels We start production We perform quality check by our quality assurance cell We deliver converted documents following the agreed schedule

Offshore Outsourcing - or Offshoring, which is a related term but has slightly different connotations - has a significant potential to improve an organization's bottom lines, make it more responsive to changes in technology, improve quality of offerings, import new and desired skill-sets into the organization and generally make the business enterprize more competetive in today's market-place. However, if done with little preparation and without a clear business case, can often be a sure recipe for disaster. We deal with the role of strategic planning in preparing for Offshore Outsourcing in a separate article. In this article we concentrate instead on what you should do after you have decided on a clear business case for your offshore outsourcing initiative, and start short listing prospective providers.Here we provide you some tips on how to actually go about executing your offshore outsourcing initiative so as to make it a success.Tip #1: Define your service level requirements (SLR) in unambiguous terms. Any outsourcing house worth its salt must have an easily customizable and flexible SLR format. If they tell you they don't, then that's one of the earliest signs of trouble. Tip #2: While defining the SLR, see how knowledgeable, responsive and helpful the contact on the provider's side is. See if she somehow adds value to the requirements generation stage by asking relevant questions. Tip #3: Remember always to beware of a provider who promises everything that you seek can be done! That is a clear lie. As a test try making seemingly difficult or impossible or costly demands. See how the contact handles these demands. Not everything that you would 'like' to have ideally would be possible in an outsourcing scenario - at least not right away. Anyone that claims that it can, either does not know the domain well or is over-committing.Tip #4: Visit the provider's office at least once. Meet the team that will work for you. Get familiar with them. Tip #5: Ask the provider to provide you a named list of people that will work for you and insist on keeping the team composition unchanged. Any changes in team should be communicated to you explicitly. Put clauses into the Service Level Agreement (SLA) ensuring these. Outsourcing is all about people. So give this the same amount of attention as you would do if you employed these people yourself in your own office. At a later date when the relationship has matured to an extent, you may consciously decide to trust your provider. But, don't do that from day one. This is in your as well as the provider's interests that this due dilligence about the work force should be done. This is one of the best ways to build a trusting relationship between you, your provider and the people that'll be working remotely for you.Tip #6: You can additionally insist for quality and security certifications. However, even if the provider has all the required certifications, you MUST visit their location and check for yourself the quality management system and the security procedures that they use in practice. Meet the security chief and the quality manager and talk to them informally about their processes.Tip #7: Insist on the provider coming up with measurable metrics about the work - both in terms of quality achieved and quantity served. Check if the metrics are such that you could double-check these on your own easily. Insist on a regular MIS reporting by the provider. The frequency of the reports will depend on various factors, but, should never be less frequent than once a month.Tip #8: Insist on reward and penalty clauses within the SLA, based on these metrics. However, be flexible in reviewing these clauses from time to time. Remember, just as you are taking a risk outsourcing the work, the provider also is taking risks. It doesn't necessarily make you a winner if the provider's costs increase unduly while acceding to your demands.

Offshore Outsourcing - or Offshoring which is a related term but has slightly different connotations - has a significant potential to improve an organization's bottom lines, make it more responsive to changes in technology, improve quality of offerings, import new and desired skill-sets into the organization and generally make the business enterprize more competetive in today's market-place. However, if done with little preparation and without a clear business case, can often be a sure recipe for disaster. We deal with the role of strategic planning in preparing for Offshore Outsourcing in a separate article. In this article we concentrate instead on what you should do after you have decided on a clear business case for your offshore outsourcing initiative, have chosen the provider and now are in a position to start transitioning the work to the offshore team.In a previous article we dealt with what you can do to mitigate your risks while negotiating an Offshore Outsourcing deal. In this article we carry that forward by providing you some tips on what to do while you are transitioning the work to your offshore team and what you should do to keep things in sharp focus as the process gradually matures and settles down to a routine affair on both sides - that is yours and the provider's sides.Tip #1: NEVER transition the full work load at one go even if you are dealing with an experienced provider. This is the surest recipe for failure! The idea is that even if the provider is experienced, it's the first time for you as a client and outsourcing is a pretty traumatic experience for an organization. It has gains, but, those will come much later. During transition it'll be mostly pains. Tip #2: Divide the transition phase into 3 to 10 phases depending on the volume of the project. At each phase set achievable goals and bring about a consensus among all stakeholders on benchmarks that you'll test against at the end of the phase.Tip #3: Do not ever set your expectations too high or over-sell to your board members or colleagues. Another surefire way to shoot point blank taking the general aim at your foot!Tip #4: Handle internal resistance within the organization carefully and logically. NEVER try to suppress the dissenting voice. While a good fraction of dissent against offshore outsourcing has political non-commercial origins, they are moulded into logical sounding packages. Suppressing them without unequivocal proofs to the contrary will be foolish and will only serve to scuttle your outsourcing efforts much before the strategy actually starts paying off.Tip #5: Try not to retrench extra staff made redundant through outsourcing. This may sound ridiculous as the whole idea behind offshore outsourcing is to replace costly local labor with cheap foreign labor. But, it's not so ridiculous if you read one of my earlier posts on leisure. It has been my experience that much of the labor being replaced through offshore outsourcing can actually be used profitably once outsourcing has been achieved. In fact this no-retrenchment path actually does away with one of the main arguments against offshore outsourcing and in the longer run actually leads to a much higher efficiency and profit levels for the organization. But, this calls for some creative thinking and a high committment to the cause of lean management on the part of the company leaders.Tip #6: There's a caveat in the last Tip. You'll find that retooling existing staff will be easier when the skillset requirements for the existing staff are low. It will be increasingly harder to retool high skill set staff and even if you do try your best, you may have to be prepared to lose them in any case! Interestingly this in fact fits well into most of the Offshore Outsourcing strategies as you'll anyway be outsourcing the predominantly low skill set jobs at a quicker rate and in larger volumes than the high skill set ones.Tip #7: If you HAVE to retrench, do that in the most humane way possible and never keep them in the dark till the end. This calls for a MUCH higher level of planning that is actually done these days. Also NEVER retrench before the transition phase is over and the outsourcing provider has been able to perform according to benchmarks for at least 3 clear months. THIS IS THE BEST WAY TO ENSURE A SEAMLESS BRINGING BACK OF THE OUTSOURCED WORK IN CASE FAILURES ARE DETECTED.Tip #8: The Retained Processes - or the processes that are not being outsourced - that have strong links to the outsourced processes are the most important. Include their representatives in the committee that you setup to oversee the transition of work. Put the people involved in the Retained Processes in direct touch with the outsourcing provider as much as you can. Remember once again, Outsourcing is all about PEOPLE AND RELATIONS BETWEEN PEOPLE. If the people that are affected by these changes are involved in the transition and are given responsible berths, the trauma will be mitigated to a large extent already. This will also lead to an all round and much closer evaluation of the provider's expertise and will be able to raise an alarm much quicker in case things are NOT going as planned.

Introduction of technologies like the Remote Sensing in the 70's have led to a number of automated techniques for spatial measurements and census taking. This has resulted in the compilation of huge digital databases both locally and also on a much more wider scale, e.g. nationally or even internationally. On top of this already voluminous spatial data, recent improvements in the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology has brought many spatially configured search technologies within the reach of many organizations like government agencies, libraries, courts, legal practitioners, traffic navigation aids etc who can now provide their users and/or customers a much more spatially relevant information search experience. Data Entry Challenges: Although the potentials for this technology are immense, there still is a huge challenge in the path to a successful implementation. This concerns with the huge initial data storage build up required for even moderate sized Georeferenceing projects. There are usually two kinds of data elements required so as to implement such a system: 1. the imagery database consisting of map images, 2. the meta-data database containing tabular metadata, item footprints and auxiliary data like placenames etc. The image database can be built through scanning of existing paper maps, satellite imagery etc and the metadata database can at least partially be gleaned from existing digital sources. However, a substantial portion of the metadata may have to be keyed in manually and the relational linking of the imagery database and the metadata will require manual intervention anyway. This could well become a substantial cost point in the implementation project and has the potential to become THE stumbling block in majority of the projects. Controlling data quality in massive data entry operations like these through internal staff is almost always out of question. They will mostly be inadequately trained in such operations simply because keying in data and ensuring data quality is very unlikely to be their core competence. Solution: The most cost effective solution for this challenge consists in outsourcing the data entry and metadata integration work to an outside organization whose core competence is to key in, validate and ensure quality in voluminous data entry projects. Such organizations will typically be equiped to handle large volume data entry operations with a number of experienced key-punching operators, quality inspection personnel and specific equipments and processes to cross validate and quality assure the output data. How Tathya Can Help: Tathya has a fully equiped key-punching and data validation unit that can be your outsourced data entry solutions partner for all your voluminous data entry requirements. Tathya also has a full blown internal IT department whose competent engineers help put in place and then solve occasional glitches in the secure data transfer infrastructure between your office and the Tathya key-punching center. The quality assurance department within the key-punching unit has several statistics, physics and geo-sciences graduates who are specifically equiped to handle overseeing advanced science oriented data entry projects like these.

With the advent of more stringent corporate legal and fiscal control standards - e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley - Records Management is not quite the animal it used to be even a couple years back. While managing electronic records like emails and other electronic document types can be automated almost completely through an enterprise wide content management software solution (ECM), managing paper records can be irritating at the least, but, has more significant business costs involved. Paper Documents: Manual management of paper documents will usually heighten corporate risk through inadvertent non-compliance, higher operational costs and rock-bottom productivity. Converting paper documents into scanned images and storing through the ECM is just a partial answer. These records have to be properly indexed so as to make the records easily retrievable at a future date. Indexing is the minimum requirement for a record management solution to be meaningful in any non-trivial compliance scenario. But, with 1000's of paper documents generated throughout an organization, it can be an arduous task to index all these documents properly and then subject them to their usual work-flow life-cycle. For example consider the case of a mid-sized business that receives 1, 000's of invoices daily. The invoices can either be mailed directly to one of the branch offices, or mailed to the main office and then routed to the branch. The enterprise may have internal requirements like the manager responsible for the concerns ordering of the goods or services may first be required to approve it and then write the general ledger codes for each item record directly on the invoice. Next, the branch managers may be required to OK the invoices and the assigned general ledger codes. The approved invoices can then be sent back to the main office periodically for entry into their accounting system and processed for payment. And at the end of the record's active life cycle (i.e. when the payment has been released), it will need to be properly filed and maintained at a central location. These 'dormant' records may again spring to life in case it is required at a future date in case some dispute arises or for purely compliance reporting requirements. And then these records will need to be retrieved from the filing system quickly and efficiently.Shared Service - Do It Yourself: One way to do it is by setting up a Shared Service Center (SSC) within the enterprise - possibly at the head office location where all documents are routed. This SSC can then be equipped with high speed scanners which can capture the document pages as scanned images. The SSC also will typically be equipped with a data center which will house servers that will house an enterprise wide ECM software system into which each scanned document page image gets registered. This SSC will also house staff members who will be required to index each scanned document image by capturing and recording salient document parameters into specialized interfaces within the ECM. The ECM will typically be integrated with other enterprise wide software implementations like the ERP, CRM and/or the Financial Accounting systems so that the mere act of indexing at the SSC initiates an appropriate work-flow corresponding to the concerned document within these other enterprise systems.Shared Service - Outsourcing: Note that the SSC proposed within the Do It Yourself method above houses staff members that need have little or nothing to do with the core competencies of the enterprise. It is also imperative that this in-house SSC will seldom have too much technological agility and will be often the victim of disruptive technology related threats. For example any technological change in the Data Storage or ECM technology areas will put the in-house SSC out of synch with the existing market trends in those areas and much of the infrastructure may soon suffer from obsolescence and reduced vendor support. To remain agile in these areas, the enterprise will be required to invest heavily in qualified IT staff who might have little use in such a low tech infrastructure except for providing the comfort of periodic spurts in activity when new technology needed to be incorporated. There will also be very low job satisfaction incentives for these highly skilled personnel to be working within a comparatively low tech job environment and attrition rates will be high.Note also that nothing that the SSC does - except for the scanning and filing of the paper documents - has the requirement to be absolutely contained within the enterprise's organizational structure or even it's premises. Once the document pages are scanned and they have moved into the ECM (this can be automated such that the mere act of scanning puts the scanned page into an indexing queue within the ECM), it hardly matters whether the actual indexing is done by a company staff or someone from an external provider's staff accessing the ECM interface through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) from a remote location. So, a very cost effective solution to the problems pointed out above would be to move the SSC (except only the scanning service) to an outsourced service provider firm.