ATKearney Procurement, UGS Corp and Tata Consultancy Services team up IT services venture

Our Corporate Bureau
06 March 2006

Calling the new joint solution the Asian Sourcing Network (ASN), the companies are teaming with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading information technology and engineering services organisation, to open the first ASN centre in Coimbatore, India.

AT Kearney Procurement Solutions is a global sourcing services firm that also augments the strategic sourcing expertise of AT Kearney, while UGS Corp is a provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) world-wide.

Through the ASN centre, which the companies opened on March 4, the three companies will locate and develop companies from low-cost countries from which manufacturers and their suppliers can electronically source engineered machine parts. ASN will provide companies with a perpetual local presence, critical to the success of low-cost country sourcing activity.

"Identifying and building effective long-term relationships with the right low-cost suppliers will be a distinguishing characteristic of leadership companies going forward," said Joseph Raudabaugh, president, AT Kearney Procurement Solutions. "Finding, developing and on-boarding these key suppliers and getting them fully embedded into supplier-partner networks is critical."

"ASN combines the extensive supplier research assessment and negotiation capabilities of AT Kearney with the collaboration, content exchange, and sourcing enablement of UGS technologies and the far reaching business experience and recognised quality services of TCS to offer low-cost country sourcing as a packaged solution," added Raudabaugh.

ASN will target the increasing need for manufacturers to tie low-cost country suppliers into their global innovation networks to help reduce cost. According to the research firm Aberdeen Group, for the global technology-driven value chain, medium and large enterprises expect to double their average spend in low-cost countries from approximately 20 per cent in 2005 to 40 per cent in 2008.