"You can't expect day-one or even month-six gains," Zupnick says. "You have to look at offshore outsourcing as a long-term investment with long-term payback."

The Cost of Selecting a Vendor

With any outsourced service, the expense of selecting a service provider can cost from .2 percent to 2 percent in addition to the annual cost of the deal. In other words, if you're sending $10 million worth of work to India, selecting a vendor could cost you anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000 each year.

These selection costs include documenting requirements, sending out RFPs and evaluating the responses, and negotiating a contract. A project leader may be working full time on this, with others chipping in, and all of this represents an opportunity cost. And then there are the legal fees. Some companies hire an outsourcing adviser for about the same cost as doing it themselves. To top it off, the entire process can take from six months to a year, depending on the nature of the relationship.

Vice President of Program Solutions and Management Ron Kifer spent several months on vendor selection before contracting with Bangalore, India-based Infosys to handle a whopping 90 percent of development and maintenance work for DHL Worldwide Express, a shipping company. "There's a lot of money wrapped up in a contract this size, so it's not something you take lightly or hurry with," Kifer says. "There has to be a high degree of due diligence making sure that the [offshore] company can respond to your needs."

Even when there is an existing tie between customer and offshore vendors, the expensive and lengthy step of vendor selection is a must-do for successful outsourcing. The chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a Mumbai, India-based outsourcer, sat on the international advisory board of Textron, a manufacturing company that owns such brands as Cessna Aircraft and E-Z-GO Golf Carts, for several years. However, when David Raspallo, CIO of business unit Textron Financial, began exploring offshore outsourcing in 1999, he still spent five months doing what he calls "the usual Betty Crocker Bake-Off" with service providers Covansys, ITS, TCS and Wipro. Ultimately, he went with U.S.-based Covansys, which has three development centers in India. Selecting the vendor took 500 hours in total, involved Raspallo and three senior managers, and cost $20,000in additional expenses.