The trend for offshoring shows no sign of abating, and it seems there’s no industry that isn’t prepared to take advantage. Recent reports in the UK press claim an Indian start-up offers schoolchildren unlimited “offshored” tutoring for just £50 a month.

The company, TutorVista, which will be based in Bangalore, is backed by American venture capital fund Sequoia Capital, (who include Google and You Tube among their clients). Next week they are to announce a new deal with publishing giant HarperCollins.

Under the new scheme students will receive their teaching from India’s vast pool of graduates via an online platform that is downloaded on to their home computer. Logging on 15 minutes before a session begins, students will click on a live link which includes an interactive whiteboard – a must have accessory in today’s classrooms – and internet phone connection.

In order to monitor the performance of the tutors pupils are asked to fill in feedback forms. The session can also be recorded to enable students to use the information for revision at a later date.

TutorVista could soon be facing some stiff competition from Pearson, the world’s largest educational publishing house, who are reported to be “very close to launching a live tutoring service.”

However, if the Indian company’s service takes off – and early signs suggest it will, with TutorVista already boasting 950 students in the US – it could make a revolution in personal tutoring.

During my recent visit to China I met up with Andrea Ochetti of Tri Source Asia. In his new blog 'Insight into China'  Andrea has picked up on a very interesting presentation "BRIC Dreams" from Jim O'Neil, Head of Global Economic Research at Goldman Sachs, which explains the  Brazil, Russia, India and China- phenomenon: the role that their economies already have in the world today and how, over the next 50 years, together they could be larger than the G6.

Andrea has also posted another innovative blog entitled 'A journey into china in 20 words and 20 pictures' which is well worth a review. A picture can say a thousand words.

Barclays pursuit of ABN Amro received top billing in business pages across Europe last week, but a study published today might make the banking giant think twice before concluding the deal.

According to research by global consultancy firm, Hay Group, a staggering 90% of European Corporate mergers fall short of their objectives, with just 9% achieving anything approaching success.

The report makes disturbing reading for any businesses planning to invest huge sums in an era of frenzied acquisitions activity (reported to be worth $1.8 trillion in the past 12 months).

The study found serious flaws in the integration of corporate cultures and governance structures. David Derain, Hay Group European M&A Director and lead author of the report concluded: “The enormous amounts invested in M&A are not delivering their promised value.”

Hay Group’s study found a majority of firms are prioritising financial and systems due diligence – 93% of senior business figures said that traditional financial due diligence was a high priority, whilst 55% focused on IT systems integration - at the expense of what they described as “the intangible assets” critical to a merger.

Over half (58%) of those questioned in the research confessed over-prioritising systems integration which resulted in a loss of focus on fundamental M&A areas such as cultural integration.

"Focusing, as most do, on key financial, legal, and structural issues, they fail to institute a pre-merger cultural due diligence,” said George McCormick, Hay Group US M&A Director.

"And in the rush to close the deal, they often give short shrift to executive assessment and selection, the new organization structure and designing the key jobs needed to be done to implement the strategy."

McCormick used one of the most disastrous mergers of modern times to make his point.

"One of the most infamous deals was the 1994 acquisition of WordPerfect by Novell,” he said. “After just two years and numerous troubles, Novell sold WordPerfect for about $1 billion less than it paid. The problem was a colossal culture clash. The two firms disagreed on everything, from decision making to customer service."

So, after such a damning set of statistics, what are company’s doing to ensure future M&A activity is structured in a way that negates the possibility of problems occurring? Well, according to the study, not that much. Whilst Derain claims many businesses are starting to move to a more robust method of reporting on intangible assets, problems persist because 70% of business leaders believe it is still too difficult to obtain intelligence on the corporate culture and human capital of M&A target companies.

Incredibly just 13% of respondents claimed engaging and integrating senior management and the workforce was given a high priority as part of their integration strategy. Only 27% said their company had analysed the cultural compatibility of the firms to be merged.

The quest to be lean is spreading from the catwalk to the supply chain - that’s if the recent results from a survey by E2open, a supply chain management software company, are to be believed.

They recently carried out 160 interviews with participants at the SAP Logistics and Supply Chain Management Conference 2007, and found that half of all respondents (48%) named a lean supply chain as their top priority.

The study suggests many companies are looking to evolve from a “push” to “pull” demand-driven strategy as they look to eliminate waste. However, like the super-models doing all they can to hit size zero, lean supply chains come with their own unique set of hazards, particularly in an era when companies are relying more heavily than ever before on suppliers across the globe.

At present it seems many companies believe the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, although as any CPO will tell you, the implementation of a lean supply chain is very much dependent of every part of the supply chain working to its optimum levels. Something the automotive industry - with continual problems with shipment methods – is continually learning to its cost.

Other issues raised by respondents in the E2open survey included; the need to obtain visibility into supply chain information by replacing manual processes with automation (45%); and the requirement to leverage economies of scale across multiple operating units (39%).

When it comes to offshoring, India and China are often the locations of choice, but recent events suggest their dominance could soon come under threat from the Latin American continent, that, in theory, offers many companies everything they could possibly hope for.

According to A.T.Kearney’s ‘Destination Latin America: A Near-Shore Alternative’, Latin America offers “significant value and resources when compared to Asia” and “has what many U.S. and some European companies want: low-cost Spanish-language capability and a growing, relatively low-cost, skilled bilingual workforce”.

Add the benefit of time zones well aligned to the United States and it’s easy to see why many American companies are beginning to eschew the benefits of Asia and are starting to look south rather than east.

No-where has this trend been better illustrated than in A.T.Kearney’s annual Global Service Location Index, which was published last week. According to the new index, Latin American countries have three entries in the top ten, with Brazil ranked highest at number five. Chile comes in at seven and Mexico at 10, to complete the list. It's worth noting both Argentina and Uruguay also feature in the top 25.

The annual study, which is the fourth of its kind, uses 40 metrics to compare the financial attractiveness, people skills and business environment of 50 countries worldwide, and claims, although the wage cost advantage of offshore locations for office services would last for another 20 years, wages in offshore locations for traditional services such as IT and call centres, have started to rise considerably - and no-where has this been more prevalent than in India.

All of which is great news for a Latin American economy that can offer a range of high-class services to both Spanish and England-speaking customers at costs comparable to those offered in the far-east and on the Indian sub-continent.

In the past few years, a huge number of leading global companies have outsourced crucial business functions to Latin America, among them Exxon, Procter & Gamble, American Express and Unilever. Vendors such as IBM, TCS and Infosys, have also established a presence in the region.

According to the A.T.Kearney study: “An increase in internationally standardized certifications, as well as an improved business environment (as reflected in improved investor confidence and lowered country risk) offset the inflationary pressures.”

However, problems in the region do persist.

Brazil, for example, still has the lowest score in Latin America on the World Bank’s “East of Doing Business” metric. And on these pages Kris Timmermans of Accenture claimed harbour capacity in South America was beginning to cause huge supply chain problems.

The A.T.Kearney study also heavily contrasts a recent presentation made at a CIPS conference by Mark Berrisford-Smith, a senior analyst at HSBC, who claimed Brazil does not compare favourably with other emerging nations in the sourcing world because of its growth rates. "Brazil does not fit into the dynamic model of India and China," Mr Berrisford-Smith said. He went further: "It is not a super dynamic economy. It is not a manufacturing superpower. It's not the supplier we believe it to be."

It may only be March but it’s already been a busy year for Britain’s most successful supermarket chain. Not only have Tesco expanded their operation in the Far East, and the US (the company opened its first store in Arizona in February), but they’ve also been blamed for damaging countless cars after their petrol was found to be contaminated with silicon.

The company now though has stolen a march on its competitors by announcing it intends to become the first supermarket to assign a new “carbon rating” to every item it sells.

The company’s chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, announced the move at a Green City Initiative conference last week, as Tesco look to cash in on the growing environmental concerns of their customers.

Leahy said he believed economic growth and environmental sustainability must come hand-in-hand, and warned: “Without growth we would end up living in an economic stone age, which would be a different kind of unsustainable future.”

Under the new plan Tesco will identify the “carbon footprint” of their products by measuring the energy required for its manufacture, packaging and transportation.

“It’s a complicated task, but the goal is simple,” Leahy said. “I want us to come up with a clear system of labelling so in future customers will be able to compare a product’s carbon footprint just as easily as they can currently compare its price or nutritional value.

“When millions of customers a week have this information and start using it to exercise green choices, believe me, it will send very powerful economic signals through the supply chain – shock waves that will change behaviour.”

If he’s right – and lets face it, Leahy has done a pretty good job of getting most things spot-on so far – the implications on the supply chain will be there for all to see.

Tesco have made a habit of leaving their competitors in their wake when it comes to green issues. In December, for example, the company announced they would begin running their fleet of 2000 trucks and vans on a 50% biodiesel mix to cut the greenhouse gases they produce. But their initiatives are far from unique in an ultra-competitive industry.

Wal-Mart announced as far back as December 2005 they intended to cut greenhouse gas output at its existing global network by one fifth by 2012, and are currently spending $500m a year to develop environmental technologies.

How many supermarkets will now follow Tesco’s lead now remains to be seen, and how much impact it will have on the spending habits of consumers only time will tell. But looking at the bigger environmental picture, Tesco, it seems, is determined to do all it can. And as the company itself never tires of telling us - “every little helps”.

When you’re looking for top tips on supply management you wouldn’t expect ‘Hang Out With Losers’ and ‘Fire Your Best People’ to feature too heavily. You would, however, be wrong, because according to Procuri and Supply Excellence, these are just two of the approaches you should be using in the pursuit of excellence.

The two companies have just published their mini e-book entitled ‘The 100 Greatest Supply Management Tips of All Time’ on their new Top Supply Tips website. And as fellow ELP blogger Tim Minahan rightly points out in his announcement post, the tips found in the book are neither complex, nor require a big budget or support from top executives. An added bonus, Minahan adds, is that they also don’t take years to deploy.

The book - which has been put together following input from Supply Excellence’s readership and meetings with supply management teams around the globe - is, according to Minahan, “part of an ongoing project to foster the exchange of best practices and to elevate the supply management discipline.”

The 100 tips on offer range from #8 ‘Four is the magic number’, which says that at least four suppliers should be involved in every negotiation to maximise competition, to #18 ‘Recruit Strangers’, which calls for the hiring of supply managers with unconventional skills and experiences.

In the Economist last week (‘Manager, offshore thyself’) was the tale of offshoring a company’s HQ. Cited in the article was the example of Nokia, who have splintered its top ranks to different locations – four of the eleven senior management making their way to New York to tackle the potentials in the convergent mobile market – and presumably a few staying in native Finland . Another example came from IBM ’s chief procurement officer, John Paterson, who has moved to China – the first time a company-wide function at the firm has been based outside America .

Across at the BBC they ran the story of Halliburton’s move from Texas to Dubai – a move some say might result in the loss of power and status of the HQ – but clearly, in this case, the result of some valuable contracts won in Iraq and extensive operations located in Saudi Arabia. (Also see 'Barclays planning Dutch HQ move').

In essence, companies make these moves to be amongst the action and to help expand the business. Usually with clearly defined goals.

The Economist quotes some unnamed academics in Sweden and Britain that suggest the corporate HQ is becoming ever more mobile – “23 firms in the Fortune 500 have moved their head offices from one country to another, more than half of them in the past five years”.

So are these examples the result of the tectonic shifts a company has to make to be competitive; the movements of a minority of organisations, or is the virtual HQ now a reality?

My own opinion is we may be some way off the virtual HQ. Whilst it sounds great and in smaller companies, like ours, a virtual office can be achievable. Hiring staff, planning, administration, strategy and general dealmaking are big nuts to crack. Achieving these core ambitions and competences across larger organisations with decentralized management will be no mean feat.

But what about today’s techno-ambidextrous departments, people and resources? Well, yes, true. As we all know companies do hive off important areas of the business to offshore locations with success. But at the end of the day business is people, managers like to be near each other, bosses near investors and people need community. Competitiveness is all very well but if it leads to state of anomie in your workforce it will, in the long term, bring benefits to no one. Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes you just can’t beat speaking to someone in person.

So is offshoring the HQ even a phenomena? Well according to research, and not much of it has been done, there are indications many organisations are increasingly flexible on the location of their functions – but this isn’t really news. In relation to the HQ pulling up the foundations at the moment there’s some, but little evidence of a mass exodus. However what is evident, regardless of my flippant comments, is technology is providing the platforms for such moves to be made increasingly simple in future. For Mr. Paterson of IBM that means already you can run global operations from anywhere in the world. I have to say that’s great news if you have the infrastructure, but I might be a little less confident of some of the places I’ve visited.

In the last edition of European Leaders in Procurement magazine Jason Busch wrote an insightful article on the future of procurement technology entitled 'Are we facing a free for all?', in which he introduced our community to Coupa Software.  Coupa is the brainchild of two Oracle veterans Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner, who set to tackle the problem at the root of most e-procurement failures: employee non-compliance.

It seems Dave and Noah's approach to revolutionise the e-procurement space is continuing to gain momentum, with the announcement they have secured A-round funding from the leading early-stage venture capital fund BlueRun Ventures, as well as several private investors. Coupa will use this investment to accelerate market and product development plans. The company also announced that Jonathan Ebinger, managing partner at BlueRun, and Vineet Buch, a BlueRun principal, joined the Coupa board of directors.

"E-procurement has hit the wall, and traditional solutions cannot be improved to re-energize it. Coupa's mission is to radically simplify e-procurement, make it affordable, and bring its unfulfilled promise of increased savings and efficiency to companies of all sizes." said Dave Stephens, CEO and co-founder. "Now, with Jonathan and Vineet on our team, we have additional operational expertise to build a strong and growing company."

"Unlike others in the industry, Dave and Noah clearly understand that the real innovation in e-procurement will happen in two areas. First, you must ensure that the average employee actually buys into e-procurement and, second, you must make the solution cost-effective enough to be accessible to companies across a broad spectrum of industries," said Jonathan Ebinger. "I believe that the convergence of significant market opportunity and the founders' expertise make Coupa a marketplace winner."

With a Starbucks within walking distance of our London office, it’s safe to say that here at ELP we enjoy the odd cup of the brown stuff, without too much thought as to where the coffee we’re drinking comes from. Now though, we can rest easy, after Starbucks announced plans to double the amount of coffee they buy from East African countries by 2009. Or can we?

In a coffee conference in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Adiba, the US giant pledged to invest in several aid measures for coffee farmers over the next three years, but behind the back-slapping and the clinking of coffee mugs, tension remains.

Starbucks, who claim that 6% of the coffee they purchased in the last fiscal year came from East Africa, is still involved in a long-running dispute with the Ethiopian government, over an application to trademark three of the country’s most famous coffee bean names – Sidamo, Harar and Yirgacheffe.

The government filed its application to US Courts in 2005, but the battle is continuing following opposition from the National Coffee Association – of which Starbucks is a leading member. In October 2006, Oxfam claimed that opposition to the move was denying Ethiopia earnings of up £47m ($88m) a year.

However, Starbucks’ senior vice-president of coffee procurement - who denied that Starbucks had directly influenced the NCA, and even claimed that the NCA had contacted them first – said that the decision to oppose the trademark was done purely for economic reasons and that the Ethiopian government was being poorly advised.

“For the US industry to exist, we must have an economically stable coffee industry in the producing industry,” he said. “This particularly scheme is going to hurt the Ethiopian coffee farmers economically.”

With that particular dispute showing no sign of resolving itself, another East African name could soon be causing Starbucks a caffeine-induced headache. Ambes Tewelde has started selling Ethiopian coffee in the town of Mekele, and after consulting friends across the pond in Atlanta has decided to name his coffee shop after the Seattle-based company.