Life and Thoughts of the Outsourced

Repost: Business Outsourcing for your Success.

Saturday, June 18, 2011 | Tags: , , ,
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Original Article from Articles About by Hamzah Hanallah


Business outsourcing is the fundamental element in a successful business venture. This is the provider of innovative solutions to business problems empowering clients for a competitive advancement so that they could mainly focus on their core business activities. Its main function is to transfer the entire critical business non core activities to external vendor that uses information technology upon providing services and delivery.

Business outsourcing business vendors or third parties are available worldwide possessing qualities such as English language proficiency, low billing rates and have high performance quality and favorable time zone. Since the application of this method in India, it is expected to grow more in the coming years and continuously influenced other countries.

This not only influences small companies, but also giant companies broadening their horizon with the help of business process outsourcing, gaining more power and production reliability.

World markets have extensive competition; however, every company has their limitations maintaining productivity and profits. Companies need comprehensive procedures to broaden their knowledge and gain expertise on the core competencies and remove non core activities by incorporating business outsourcing services.

Business outsourcing became the sorting business practice. The outsourcing services leads to the formulation of the business and strategic partnerships. It can be associated with other business sectors divided into manufacturing and services where information technology is categorized.

Business outsourcing is a part of the non core activity designated to third party with skill expertise on various activities regulated under a legal agreement. There are different features of business outsourcing categorized as project management, professional services, outsourcing development units with proficient resources and joint venture with an offshore trader or a subsidiary that is owned for offshore outsourcing services. They provide productive advantages beneficial not only to the customer but also to the service providers.

Take for instance, your business is bearing manufacturing, its core competency lies in the manufacture of bearing but the organization cannot give their entire focus on the core competency because it has to deal with various business functions such as invoicing, documentation, data entry, inventory management, finance and accounting. There are lots of lost valuable resources that are profitable if integrated properly. Business outsourcing helps in decreasing business issues accepting some loads such as finance and accounting processes.

The application of business sourcing strategic planning and decision are critical. Reviews of its importance must be given weight for the company’s success upon its implementation.

For offshore lead generation consider hiring the best outsourcing solution.

Is Offshoring a Good Way to Do Business?

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People have clearly shown some feelings regarding offshoring and outsourcing during the past few years. Some consider it a blessing and others see it as a very very dark way of doing business. I read a specific article from The Ecoomist that really caught my eye regarding this offshoring . (click on the link to see the original article)


Offshoring

Economists argue that offshoring is a win-win phenomenon

Oct 28th 2009 | From The Economist online

Offshoring—the wholesale shifting of corporate functions and jobs (particularly those of back-office workers in it and accounting-type roles) to overseas territories—is what gave outsourcing a bad name. It is important, however, to note a crucial distinction between the two:

• Outsourcing need not necessarily result in job losses in a particular territory or country. A job can simply be handed over to another organisation of the same nationality and geographical location where (the company handing it over hopes) it can be carried out more efficiently. Sometimes that other organisation may be in another country, but more often than not it is not.

• Offshoring, however, does involve shifting jobs to another country, but it may not involve transferring jobs to another organisation. For example, a company may simply decide to move its local customer services operation to one of its own subsidiaries abroad. That is offshoring, but it is not outsourcing.

Economists argue that offshoring is a win-win phenomenon: the country that sends the work abroad gains from lower costs, and the country that gains the work gets extra jobs. But countries sometimes panic about the scale of offshoring. When production jobs moved en masse to China and other cheap labour destinations, rich-world governments did not worry unduly because they thought that their workers could glide painlessly from manufacturing jobs to service jobs. Who, they thought, would begrudge giving up a lifetime on the factory floor for a lifetime in a clean, antiseptic office?

The real problem arose when the service jobs also started to go abroad, when every other service company’s call centre suddenly seemed to be based in Bangalore, in the middle of India, not Indiana. What were western workers going to move on to this time, once they had been priced out of the services sector?

At one stage, Americans became almost hysterical about the issue. A 2004 report by Forrester Research, a highly reputable firm, estimated that 3.3m American jobs would have gone offshore by 2015. This was immediately taken as a known fact. But the author of the report subsequently told the Wall Street Journal that his estimates were no more than “educated guesses”. As one commentator said: “The public’s intense desire to understand the scope of the problem has bred a reliance on statistics that even [Forrester] admits are based heavily on guesswork.”

In practice, the hysteria died down, even as the benefits of offshoring were being questioned more and more. Managers found it increasingly difficult to manage far-flung service operations in cultures they did not understand, and firms began to bring some functions back to their home base—especially call centres, where customers often found it difficult to explain localised problems to someone working in a totally different climate in a totally different time zone. Indeed, in 2006 an Indian call-centre operator opened a new centre in Northern Ireland.

Closely allied to offshoring is the concept of nearshoring, a phenomenon whereby companies shift operations, often IT-related ones, to foreign countries that are close to their own, but where they can still gain a labour-cost advantage—from the United States, for example, where Spanish is the second language, to Mexico; or from Japan to the Chinese city of Dalian, which was occupied by the Japanese for many years and where there are Japanese-speakers. Nearby countries are more likely to speak the same language as the country of the corporation doing the offshoring; they are more easily accessible at short notice; and they are unlikely to leave the short-stay visitor with jet lag.


Visit The Economist for more readings.

Top Reasons Why Businesses Outsource

Friday, June 17, 2011 | Tags: , , ,
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Outsourcing is, if you look at the bigger picture, actually not a new idea. The whole meaning of the word is still in debate on what it means. Don't get me wrong, I get the whole idea. Outsourcing, in the most simplest sense, is basically contracting a certain business or service out to an external provider. These specific services were once done in-house. Basic examples of these services are the janitorial services, customer support, front desk stuff and marketing.


Next thing that would pop out of your mind is, why outsource? Here are some reasons why businesses from all over outsource, this is all from wikipedia.com and I will list them here:

  • Cost savings — The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, and cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called "labor arbitrage" generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.
  • Focus on Core Business — Resources (for example investment, people, infrastructure) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialised IT services companies.
  • Cost restructuring — Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable.
  • Improve quality — Achieve a steep change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement.
  • Knowledge — Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.
  • Contract — Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.
  • Operational expertise — Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house.
  • Access to talent — Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.
  • Capacity management — An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier.
  • Catalyst for change — An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process.
  • Enhance capacity for innovation — Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.
  • Reduce time to market — The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.
  • Commodification — The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations.
  • Risk management — An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.
  • Venture Capital — Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for start-ups that start businesses in their country.
  • Tax Benefit — Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country.
  • Scalability — The outsourced company will usually be prepared to manage a temporary or permanent increase or decrease in production.
  • Creating leisure time — Individuals may wish to outsource their work in order to optimise their work-leisure balance.
  • Liability — Organizations choose to transfer liabilities inherent to specific business processes or services that are outside of their core competencies.

Outsourced

Friday, December 10, 2010 | Tags:
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Welcome to my new blog. This will be all about my life as an "outsourcee" and I know that is not a word. At least 20% of the people I know work in a call center these days and I'm not so sure if that is actually a good thing.
Its not a bandwagon movement though. I consider it more of a practical choice. I myself find the shifts, pay, and benefits very much practical. In my case, I also get to practice all the witticisms and lines I heard and read. Plus, its always fun to be the one in control. Its a whole lot better to be the one to run to. Most of the time, people call because they want something from you, and chances are, you are the one on the wheel.
So sit tight, relax and grab the hand of the person right next to you. This will be fun...

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