Bharti Airtel - Summary

Bharti Airtel is one of the largest telecommunications companies in India.The company was founded in 1995, by taking advantage of liberalization of Indian telecom market by 2004, the company was present in 15 telecom circles, covering the main economic and industrial areas. Bharti’s plan was to achieve full coverage in India by 2005. The case study “Strategic Outsourcing at Bharti Airtel Limited” discusses the impact of quick growth on Bharti Airtel Limited, outsourcing proposals to vendors and reactions to the proposal from Bharti employees and their vendors. Akhil Gupta, joint managing director of Bharti Airtel Limited, proposed a plan of outsourcing Bharti key telecom network equipment to vendors, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens; and outsourcing its IT requirements to IBM.

Bharti’s future plan for expansion was facing numerous problems such as: Capital expenditures, keeping pace with expansion, cutting-edge IT requirements that could provide scalability to meet the company’s future expansion demands. Staying competitive amongst capitally sound competitors such as Tata and Reliance and focusing on core competencies mainly network operation and innovative sales/marketing strategies were their primary concern.

Bharti Outsourcing Proposal to its vendors: Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens were to provide, install and maintain network capacity in accordance with Bharti’s requirements under an operation and management agreement. IBM was to provide complete management services for supplying, installing and managing all the IT requirements that would aid Bharti operations. In order to assure quality of Bharti’s service to employees and end users, vendors services will be subjected to quality control specified by SLAs.

Reactions to the proposal from Bharti employees and their vendors: Bharti personnel were concerned about handing over network management and operations to the vendors, HR department worried on how they would manage the transfer of 1000 personnel