Home Depot outsourced it’s B2B and EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) support to India, Pakistan or somewhere in Asia long ago.\u00a0 It’s a model demonstration of the failures that can come from outsourcing.\u00a0 The long running jokes about Indian call center support embraced by US technology and telecommuncations companies have spread across almost all areas of I.T.\u00a0 \u00a0This particular failure on the part of Home Depot is of particular importance because it\u00a0causes disruption in their vendor supply chain.<\/p>\n
Honorable mention goes to Home Depot for their selection of unqualified candidates to work in their B2B support center.\u00a0 Not only are they generally unhelpful and unknowledgeable regarding things like their own EDI mapping specifications, but Home Depot has found it acceptable to hire those who ONLY speak Farci or Urdu with almost zero ability to speak English.\u00a0 This is no exaggeration or matter of interpretation.\u00a0 My guess is the top of the totem pole in Atlanta probably isn’t even aware how bad the situation is with this language barrier.\u00a0 I challenge anyone in their stateside senior management to call their own B2B support department and hold a conversation.\u00a0 Our organization has been required to call in our Indian and Pakistani product managers to sit on calls and speak with the HD B2B support staff in their native language because they genuinely did not know the words in the English language to communicate high level technical information to our internal EDI staff or our application vendors.\u00a0 This is when you know they’ve gone too far in their quest to offset costs.<\/p>\n
Predictably Home Depot could play the “we can’t find U.S., Canadian or European workers with the skill set to fill these roles”.\u00a0 Well, you didn’t find them in India or Pakistan either.\u00a0 Furthermore the document specifications and translation sets are written in English code, specifically XML. If they can’t speak it my guess is they couldn’t read a map or the specification sets during training either.<\/p>\n
We are at a point of impasse in our organization right now when it comes to turning up a new trading partnership for Home Depot Canadian distribution centers even though we have a signed supplier agreement because we literally can’t find anyone in Home Depot B2B who can communicate with us in English.\u00a0 Furthermore when we engage our language translators they still can’t grasp technical concepts well enough to even provide us proper document specifications for their domestic and international programs.\u00a0 This is why Home Depot’s long running B2B outsourcing initiative deserves a resounding FAIL.<\/p>\n
Home Depot has\u00a0millions of dollars to fix this problem and insure faster supply chain integration.\u00a0 Apparently the decision not to fix the problem is completely based on trying not to pay U.S., Canadian or European technical specialists the wages such B2B and EDI expertise demands, opting instead for cheap, unqualified, outsourced Asian call center operatives who are at best ineffective in their roles and in many cases detrimental to vendor supply chain integration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Home Depot outsourced it’s B2B and EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) support to India, Pakistan or somewhere in Asia long ago.\u00a0 It’s a model demonstration of the failures that can come from outsourcing.\u00a0 The long running jokes about Indian call center support embraced by US technology and telecommuncations companies have spread across almost all areas of … Continue reading Home Depot B2B EDI “support” is a model of Asian outsourcing failure.<\/span>