The R&D team of Neusoft

Dalian Hekou Neusoft Park

Walking into the Alpine Dalian Car Audio Center, the largest research and development (R&D) center in Asia for the famed Japanese car electronics producer, you will see 500 engineers busily at work.

Of them about 150 are hardware design engineers from Alpine and others are software development engineers from Neusoft, a leading IT solutions and services company and the largest offshore outsourcing provider in China. They work together as a team to develop car audio products for top global auto brands.

The team jointly develop prototypes at the R&D center and then deliver them to Alpine's factory in Dalian for mass production, after which products are exported to international marketplaces.

In Shenyang, a city near Dalian and capital of Liaoning province, a joint team of Alpine and Neusoft are also working on the development of a drive assistance system, trying to enable future cars to identify moving objects and even follow roads for safer driving.

Brand new ecosystem

They call it a new ecosystem for product engineering.

The cooperation with Alpine is only one example of Neusoft's work with many world-famous electronic manufacturers.

Dalian-based Neusoft has dozens of R&D centers with oversea partners for digital components in the medical, home products, IT and other industries.

"The market competition in electronic products has become fierce. More functional expectations, enlarged development scale, shortened life cycle, increased software applications, less time to market and stringent quality requirements have made existing players insatiable for new R&D, production systems, and business models. Professional and scalable product engineering services will become a trend." said Zhang Xia, senior vice-president, chief technology officer and chief knowledge officer of Neusoft Corp.

Many multinational corporations are now transferring their embedded system design and R&D work to Asia, bringing great opportunities to businesses in China and India.

As a global manufacturing base, China has one of the largest electronic manufacturing industries in the world, which provides a huge potential for product engineering services centered on embedded software.

In 2007, about 50 percent of China's offshore outsourcing income came from embedded software.

"Multinationals are thinking about how to allocate resources worldwide to create a global ecosystem in the new industrial competition. With its abundant technical talent, China will become an emerging power in the global product engineering ecosystem." said Liu Jiren, chairman & CEO of Neusoft Corporation.

"It is the talent pool that makes China a destination for global innovation. How to acquire qualified talent in large quantity to satisfy the coming fast expansion of product engineering is a big challenge for Neusoft." Liu added.

To help meet that demand, Neusoft has invested in three IT universities in China with 23,000 on-campus students.

The universities have built a business focus by training industry-oriented IT talent and sharing human resources with their customers and partners.

Each year Neusoft will hire several hundred top students from the three schools.

The company has established an multifaceted approach to employee recruiting. It has a long-term strategy to ensure recruitment of a large number of qualified employees to meet the challenge of fast expansion.

Neusoft has also set up industry-oriented training programs in more than 50 colleges and universities in China to select and cultivate their future employees.

Pre-job trainings

Last year, the company launched the Neusoft Software Talent Internship and Training Base with 5,000 students in Shenyang, now largest in China.

By delivering curriculum covering project development, latest technology, project management and team communication, Neusoft offers college students with in-depth understanding of both the industry and Neusoft's operations.

The pre-employment training allows college students to acquire the skills needed for working in Neusoft in advance to reduce new employee training costs while increasing efficiency.

Using the approach, Neusoft employed 7,000 new professionals over the past two years. By June 2008, its total number of employees surpassed 14,000.

Abundant human resources reserve will be helpful for competitiveness so the company can leverage the booming opportunities in global marketplaces.

Together with its technology and expertise, sound quality control, fast delivery capacity and extensive customer resources, Neusoft has established a solid foundation for its future expansion in product engineering.

Besides human resource expansion, another important move by the company is accelerating expansion of outsourcing services through global delivery centers.

Neusoft has now started delivery centers in Shenyang, Dalian, Chengdu, and Nanjing, to provide outsourcing services to global customers.

This summer, the Dalian Hekou Neusoft Park was formally launched in Dalian Hi-tech Industrial Zone.

The new park, second of its kind funded by Neusoft in Dalian, may house 10,000 engineers. Together the parks will become the largest software and services global delivery center of Neusoft.

Neusoft Chairman Liu said that Neusoft plans to improve its international revenue from the current 30 percent of the total to 50 percent in the coming three to five years.

(China Daily)