Posted on 11/13/2005 4:49:48 PM PST by jb6
HOUSTON, Nov 14 Asia Pulse - India is poised to become a major venue for outsourcing in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing, a new report by researchers involved in the first joint conference between Indian and American chemical engineers has said.
"The chemical-engineering strength in India is definitely something to reckon with now, with very good high-quality personnel in academia and industry," said Doraiswami Ramkrishna, who completed a report for the National Science Foundation about the first Joint conference of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. ADVERTISEMENT
"...Research and development establishments in India are going to be hiring a substantial number of PhD-level employees in the coming years," said Ramakrishna, a chemical engineering professor at Purdue University.
According to the report on the conference held in Mumbai last year, India is on the verge of expanding its capabilities into many outsourced manufacturing areas, including the chemical industry, textiles and pharmaceuticals.
The country has the second largest number of pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, which means it is in position to ramp up its pharmaceutical industry, said Kenneth H. Keller, a Professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota.
"India is not yet a major player, but its research and development spending is increasing at a tremendous rate," said Keller, who is also the Charles M Denny Jr Professor of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the university.
(PTI)
Uh, yeah.....right man (Tommy Chong)
If only we increased the cost of manufacturing pharmaceuticals in the U.S., we could nip this off-shoring nonsense right in the bud. /sarcasm
who needs this industry, we've got Applebees and Walmart. and american are all going to get rich selling each other real estate at ever higher prices, aren't we?
Call centres in general have become a major target for corporate fraud, with some gangs even funding people through university so they can access jobs further up the management ladder, and therefore making it easier to perpetrate higher levels of fraud.
But now experts say that the trend of off-shoring these operations has presented a new set of problems.
Ken Milliken, head of the forensic team at KPMG Scotland, says: “You can gain access to personal details if you work in a call centre and, if you are unscrupulous, set up an identity fraud or even pass along credit card details to someone else . It doesn’t take that much to plug a thumb drive with a software programme into the back of a computer that records all the key strokes on that computer .
“If the call centre is offshore, the interesting question becomes if somebody in say India moves money from a Scottish account to another Scottish account, where has the crime been committed? Can Scottish police do anything about it? It’s not clear whether they have jurisdiction but at any rate it would be much more difficult to investigate.”
The problem was highlighted at the KPMG Scottish Fraud Conference held in Glasgow last week by speakers such as David Leitch, head of the fraud and financial crime unit at the Strathclyde Police Force.
New business practices and advances in technology have given criminals more avenues to pursue and are contributing to a steep rise in fraud.
According to KPMG’s bi annual Fraud Barometer, the total value and number of cases in the first five years of this decade have already exceeded all those of the 1990s. In the first six months of 2005, cases totalling £249 million were brought to court, £9m of which came from Scotland. The true cost is difficult to judge, however, as many businesses never report the crime.
Other strategies that are contributing to the explosion are so-called long firm frauds, where someone sets themselves up as a wholesaler and places orders with suppliers with no intention of ever paying for the goods. The company then dissolves and disappears.
“Small suppliers are always very interested in getting sales and they are the most vulnerable to this fraud,” says Milliken. “It’s a big problem in Scotland. Often a company will go under thinking it is because of a bad debt and don’t realise they’ve been a victim of a crime until they are in liquidation.”
Although large financial institutions and insurance companies are catching up with the criminals by, for example, investing in transaction monitoring systems, not all companies are putting in the resources. Nor are they co-operating as much as they should.
“What doesn’t happen in Scotland is the sharing of information. Organisations tend to keep their fraud problems to themselves,” says Milliken. While this might ward off short-term publicity, it lets fraudsters move on to the next victim.
He says managers should ensure all employees are aware of their stance on fraud and follow through with prosecutions to send a message to others. He also advises that proper controls are put in place so that no one person ever has the ability to create a transaction, process it, authorise and make a payment. And he says businesses must make better use of the information in their systems to detect potential fraudsters.
“ You can look at dates of transactions. Are they on Saturdays and Sundays, when nobody processes transactions? Are there round sums, which are very unusual? Software is available to detect these things.”
13 November 2005
I'm a manufacturing team leader (granulation/compression) for a top 20 pharma. R&D can't do sh*t without our equipment, and they'll have a hell of a time dealing with the third world. Culture matters, even more so in business.
IT does not involve creativity, usually. Most defrag your disc, install anti-spyware software, a router, and that's all they know. If that.
What would I pay for such a service? Nothing. I can do it myself, and a lot better, because it is my machine.
IT idiots learned that they only had to take a MS course, and then could charge through the yang to servie folks that had no clue. Some of them are UNIX heads; way to bet on a loser.
I can pay a 13 year old next door to take care of my com[uter, for 10 an hour.
The real programmers (they hate being called IT folks) can do anything.
BUt the maroons that got ahold of a silly MS certification atr no more empooyable as UNIX folks.
I am amused by folks that want to protect their skills, instead of learning new ones. Perhaps they are too stupid to do anything else, I don't know.
But I do know that LabView programmers get between $100 and $150 an hour. It's a programming language, and there is a large shortage . Anyone who considers herself a programmer and dooesn't learn this is doomed to fix 386 computers, or some such.
Then again, you have to have an IQ well beyond the typical MS certified idiot.
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