Boeing will eliminate about 150 positions in finance and accounting in October as part of an effort to streamline these departments’ operations and will outsource this work to a firm in India.
Boeing told nonunion corporate staff in an all-hands virtual meeting this month that it will begin outsourcing finance and accounting jobs to Tata Consultancy Services of India.
Boeing said Tuesday that about 150 jobs nationwide will be cut in the first batch of layoffs, with more to come next year and thereafter. The first layoff notices will go out in October.
“The Finance team is planning for lower staffing levels as it simplifies processes, improves efficiency and shares select work with an outside partner,” Boeing said in a statement, adding that it “will assess future impacts as the process continues in the coming years.”
A still-employed senior finance employee at Boeing who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity said: “It was kind of a shock the way they rolled it out. They had the all-hands enterprise meeting and then four days later everyone was moved into new organizations with new managers.”
Managers at Tata began consulting with Boeing finance and accounting managers this week to identify the work they’ll take over and once that’s done, Boeing will start letting people know if they’re laid off. This includes some management employees, Seattle Times said. And before they leave, the soon-to-be-let-go employees are expected to train Tata personnel in Boeing procedures “to smooth the handover of the work.”
The planned layoffs are part of a broad and concerted Boeing effort in recent years to cut nonunion corporate jobs.
“Several of our corporate functions, including Information Technology and Finance, have implemented changes to streamline their operations, resulting in lower staffing levels” in those areas, Boeing said Tuesday.
That push began with moves to get rid of IT work that could be done more cheaply elsewhere and was not seen as central to Boeing’s business.
Tangentially related: you can find several threads on Fishbowl comparing Tata and Big 4: a Deloitter asking for opinions, a KPMGer who wants to know about working for TCS (“Friend has been working there for a few weeks and still doesn’t have a laptop so going pretty well”), and a PwCer asking about the difference between Big 4 and Indian IT firms like Tata, Infosys, and Wipro (or the “WITCH” firms), among others.
