Sainsbury's axing Arndale office jobs as supermarket giant outsources to India

Supermarket giant Sainsbury's is axing jobs at its city centre Arndale office as it looks to cut its costs, it has been confirmed. Jobs will instead outsourced to locations such as India.

Roles across food commercial, finance operations and people services and HR are being outsourced to the firm Accenture threatening at least 300 jobs across the UK. The company could not confirm how many of these 300 jobs were at their office in Arndale House while a consultation process takes place.

Staff were made aware of these impending changes yesterday. The email, seen by the Manchester Evening News , written by CEO Simon Roberts, says the company needs to 'save to invest' and that they 'must keep moving at pace to become more efficient and embed simpler and better ways of working'.

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Mr Roberts added to employees: "I do want to be upfront that as we look to the future, we have to keep looking across our business for ways we can be simpler and more efficient. This means over time we will need to consider in what further ways this approach could help us continue to simplify our business."

Getting to the outsourcing, he says: "From this summer - subject to consultation - we'll start to remove process-based activity from our teams and bring it together in one dedicated location. This way of working is called a shared service centre operating model and many businesses across the UK and around the world use this approach to transform their processes, standardising and simplifying tasks. This includes our key competitors and many of our large suppliers.

"We will partner with Accenture to create an expanded shared service centre in Mumbai, India.