One of the main reasons for outsourcing these days is to pursue new
opportunities. In such cases, the outsourcing partner should be a strong
generalist or leading-edge boutique firm specializing in the desired areas
of expertise. Often, these engagements rely on the outsourcer to provide
already trained staff and to offer knowledge transfer to internal staff.
Some examples of pursuing an opportunity include:
- Gaining expertise for a new business process or technology.
A company may desire to enter a new business market or implement a
new technology but may lack the inhouse expertise to do the job. For
example, a "brick and mortar" company may have plenty of
expertise in back-office systems, but it needs different expertise to
launch an e-business operation. Competitive time pressures preclude the
ability to grow the expertise internally and eliminate the luxury of
learning through mistakes. By bringing in an outsourcer to share its
expertise, rather than learning new methods and techniques from scratch,
the company can launch its e-business sooner and more effectively.
Many companies have disparate pieces of things -- activities,
processes, technologies -- that have evolved independently over time.
Rather than selecting an outsourcer to simply maintain a disparate,
existing environment, a company can chose an integrator with the
experience to merge multiple systems and technologies to provide greater
overall value to the company. For example, as part of its engagement, an
outsourcer can consolidate and rationalize multiple sources of customer
information.
- Making better use of existing assets.
Outsourcers learn best practices from working with many different
types of clients. Combining these practices with a fresh, outside point
of view enables an outsourcer to leverage existing assets in ways that
would otherwise be missed. For example, a company may have robust
human-resource applications whose life could be extended and value
enhanced by being Web-enabled and made available to employees via a
corporate intranet. Another possibility is to use the outsourcer as an
agent to identify and license a promising internal technology to its
other clients. This type of arrangement can range from selling excess
mainframe computer resources to packaging and selling application
software.
- Improving efficiency or lowering costs.
Improving efficiency and lowering costs are the most typical reasons
that companies turn to outsourcing. An outsourcer, through its
efficiencies of scale and replicable best practices, improves
efficiency, saves money, or does both by getting things done sooner,
getting things done for less money, or getting more work done for the
same cost. In the right situations, some outsourcers will even guarantee
specific levels of savings. A classic example of improving efficiency
and lowering costs is outsourcing data-processing operations. Hardware
outsourcers reap considerable economies of scale and can provide their
clients access to technologies they could otherwise not afford.
