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On the other hand, a top BPO company looking at an add-on center could go to any of the locations judged purely on tangible parameters, of course, in today's context, which takes into account the saturation of a location. No wonder, most of these companies are queuing up for Pune. The city's manpower and infrastructure are excellent and the business decisions will anyway happen in any of the major locations. In other words, these are good satellite locations.

What kind of processes will the facility be used for? As more and more diverse processes come to India, the skill-location mapping that has already been created on a de facto basis will become a clear parameter to decide on locations. Today, most of the high-volume generating work comes to the major locations. While the National Capital Region (Gurgaon in particular) get most of the high volume of voice work because of its good accent and the ability to absorb a lot of growth, Bangalore with its 'tech capital' tag gets a lot of technical support work. Mumbai is balanced with BFSI processes being slightly predominant. However, what is noteworthy is how some locations are building strong skill sets in some domain areas.

Chennai, a location with problems of accent, realized its weakness early and concentrated on non-voice work. The companies here chose to target the healthcare providers and the fragmented medical coding and billing industry. As a result, Chennai today houses 80% of the medical coding and billing companies in India. It has created a sort of entry barrier for other cities. Any company entering this space in a big way will like to tap the trained manpower, especially middle-level managers, and thus can never overlook Chennai.

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* Contributed by -
Ankur Pawa & Nishant Choudhary,
Indian Institute of Management,
Lucknow.