Updated: Toll outsourcing 200 jobs to India

Around 200 IT staff at Toll Group will lose their jobs over the next two years as the logistics giant outsources work to Indian outsourcing company, Infosys.

According to a report in ITWire today, Toll’s IT operations will be headquartered in Pune, India at a ‘Toll Technology Centre’ and staffed by 250 tech professionals. Toll’s technology function in Australia is staffed by around 600 people.

Toll employs about 43,000 people around the world with a global tech teams also based in Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore.

In a statement sent to CIO Australia, a Toll spokesperson said part of Toll’s IT strategy is to ensure it has the right capabilities and work is being performed in the right location, which could be anywhere in the world.

“As part of this, we are introducing new skills and expect to outsource transactional activities to our global IT partners and operate centres outside of Australia. We expect about 200 roles in Australia to be impacted by these changes over a two year period,”the spokesperson said.

However, the spokesperson said the company is creating more than 380 new IT roles in Australia that are directly linked to its technology transformation and “will enable us to transform our digital capabilities.”

“We are fully committed to supporting our employees through these changes and our priority is to redeploy as many staff as possible,”the spokesperson said.

Toll Group is the midst of a three-year technology transformation, led by chief information officer, Francoise Russo, who joined the company in August 2006.

Russo commenced work that year on a new IT strategy and design of a new global IT operating model. The objectives were to stabilise a large, complex legacy IT environment that was falling short in delivering the level of services the business needed to compete on a global scale.

It’s a $420 million investment in technology that covers several programs of work that will transform everything from Toll’s core systems to its customer-facing channels. Toll’s managing director, Michael Byrne has described the investment as “Toll’s largest ever investment and single biggest endeavour in technology.”

“Toll is a global organisation operating across more than 50 countries and we are building a global approach to our IT strategy and capabilities. Over the next three years, we are investing over $400 million into new technology to improve our customer experience and drive efficiencies,”the spokesperson said.

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