It may not be Ross Perot's“giant sucking sound” you're hearing, but according to businessadvisory firm the Hackett Group, as many as 750,000 finance,treasury, IT and other business services jobs could be offshoredbetween now and 2016, continuing a trend that has already seenclose to 1.5 million such jobs moved offshore by companies in theU.S. and Europe.

Hackett, which surveyed some 4,700 U.S. and European companieswith more than $1 billion in revenue, claims companies thatimplement what it refers to as a global business services operatingmodel, which includes shifting jobs to low-wage areas like India orEastern Europe where appropriate, can achieve cost savings of about29%.

“For a typical Global 1000 company with $28.8 billion inrevenue, these reductions amount to $314 million in annualsavings,” according to the Hackett Group report.

“We're not generally talking about offshoring corecompetencies,” says Michel Janssen, a principal at Hackett who wasone of the chief researchers on the study.

Janssen, pictured above, says much of the offshoringcurrently taking place involves setting up or moving units of thecompany to lower-wage locations overseas, rather than hiringoutside vendors. He cites a corporate treasury example: “If youhave reporting and reconciling functions, and you can get goodpeople in India to do them for $10,000 to $15,000 a year, insteadof $10,000 to $15,000 a month in the U.S., you not only save money,but you can get a lot more reports done.”

He notes that over the next four years, treasury departments atlarger U.S. companies are on track to offshore another 15% to 24%of their staff.

These offshoring moves are limited when itcomes to core competencies like deciding how to invest thecompany's cash, jobs that require proximity to the company orsenior managers, or jobs that require “context,” Janssen says.

Even with those restrictions, he says, the skill level of jobsbeing offshored has been rising. “A few years ago, it was hard tofind good people abroad, but now at the bottom and middle part ofthe food chain, there's just about nothing that you can do at homethat you can't do in India or Eastern Europe,” Janssen says.

Hackett estimates that of the 5.1 million business services jobsremaining in the US and Europe, some 1.8 million could stillpotentially and profitably be offshored. But the Hackett studypredicts the pace of offshoring will start to taper off by 2014,and that by 2016, the total number of business services jobs thatare even potentially offshorable will be down to one million

Craig Martin, executive director of the corporate treasurers'council of the Association for Financial Professionals, confirmsthat corporate treasuries are doing a lot of offshoring.

“There was a period when companies were outsourcing corefunctions,” Martin says. “It was kind of a craze.

The trend has been reversed to some extent, as companies broughtcore functions back in-house, Martin says. “But the trend ofoutsourcing and offshoring more transactional functions has beenaccelerating.”

“You don't see something like cash management or hedgingactivities being offshored,” he explains. “But you do see moretransactional activities like the whole purchase-to-pay cycle beingmoved abroad.”

To read about Indian outsourcing firms opening centers inthe U.S., see Tide Turns in Outsourcing.