Battling the outsourcing monster

I returned from the holiday vacation this morning to discover that I have been tasked with reviewing the possibilities of outsourcing mechanical design work from India.
This is some hair brain idea that my bu$h loving manager has mentioned a couple of times. Now he wants to really explore it.

So I need all the ammunition I can to combat this process and save the jobs of the guys that work for me.
Anyone who has experience with receiving any design or drafting from India please post them here.
I will use them in my battle against the beast.

These are the bad things that will happen to him:

1) All projects will take 3 times as long, due to time differences, language barriers, and the need to anally spec every frigging little detail before assigning work to India.

2) Even after all that, the work they deliver will be sub-par, and have to be re-done 1 or more times.

3) Outsourcing firms, particularly ones in India, do not provide you with static employees. They rotate employees constantly. This means you LOSE your SMEs (Subject Matter Experts), which is equivalent to losing your intellectual property. You'd have to be constantly re-issuing the same documentation and information to fresh, new workers that have no idea what the previous ones did, and no idea what your business is, how it works, or what you need.

Basically, production will come to a crawl, quality will suck total ass, and over time, you'll go out of business as there will be NO ONE left that actually understands it.

institution like MIT and pick their brains for solutions? They have an interest in their grads being employed after spending a horrendous amount of money on tuition.

was done horribly over there, and we had to pull it back in-house. I wish you were in a position to tell you're boss to shove his outsourcing up his ass. Just wait until you are faced with hundreds of drawing and design revisions, and projects end up way over budget because some greedy asshole thought it would make good financial sense to put people here at home out of work. Hopefully he'd have some explaining to do...

Good Luck.

to fix what comes back from India.

Also, forget flexibility. Sometimes we like to say "starting x date, the requirements are frozen, the design is set". But that never quite happens in real life. Try getting a quick change done. It only breaks things worse.

(This is not from drafting or design, but from software construction)

The results of outsourcing in the IT industry, results effecting work product quality and security.

Not good at all.

Good look finding them and having them outweigh the costs though.

Short term, outsourcing can be more efficient and less costly. In the long term, that's not always the case. Also, if he is at all a control-freak over employees, that's lost. Be on the ready to answer 'We'll just cancel the contract' with answers to the costs of finding and replacing the contracter as well.

I read something about a supplier to Toyota - Japan plants calling back it's mechanical engineering work from India. I forget the name of the company. Sorry. In the early 90's they invested heavily in Indian labor to design assembly machinery for Toyota and other companies and after 8 years of problems they finally decided to stop using Indian labor. I distinctly remember the article saying the supplier's major customer was Toyota in Japan but they had other Asian customers. Seems like I read the article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution print version of the newspaper in 1999 or 2000. Sorry I can't give you more but that might be enough for a googling.

I googled Stop Outsourcing:

http://www.nojobsforindia.com/

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/virgin/134913_virgin14.html

http://www.uswa.org/uswa/program/content/1596.php

...will be interesting, especially considering the time difference. Of course your designer can just gather his documents and drive out to the vendor and solve the problem. Oh, wait.

Are any of your designs export sensitive? If you do work for other companies, are their designs export sensitive? Do they care that their design (or yours) will be open to scrutiny by anyone on the planet after they are transmitted?