Online outsourcing

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Online outsourcing is the business process of contracting third-party providers, which can be overseas, to supply products or services which are delivered and paid for via the Internet.

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Internet-based outsourcing

Online outsourcing is the Internet-based version of outsourcing. This process is when one department, or indeed a whole area of work, transfers tasks and projects to a third party company. [1]

Examples of such tasks could be programming, web development and web design, multi-media production, logo design or search engine optimization not forgetting services like translations, research and editorial work. In this case, online platforms can serve to simplify the process of attaining and assigning project based work. [2] IT work that is outsourced is temporary and assembled to providing short-term support, rather than working through the entire product lifecycle. [3]

Offshoring is a variant of outsourcing, respective tasks can be offshored by situating them in another country. This could be both a business task or indeed an entire business process. Nearshoring is a variant of offshoring. Tasks are not relocated to a country that is very far afield on another continent. Instead tasks are nearshored closer to the home country. [2]

Homeshoring, as a variant of outsourcing, describes the location of third party services which are not undertaken by companies but by remote workers. [2]

Benefits of online outsourcing

Information technology (IT) outsourcing, and any kind of digital outsourcing, can result in consequential knowledge transfer that benefit the sourcing partner in the longrun. [4]

Through online outsourcing a company can relieve itself of secondary tasks and concentrate on core issues, thus improving its efficiency. Or as Peter Drucker expressed it, "Do what you can do best and Outsource the rest." [5]

According to Deloitte’s research, the primary reason to outsource jobs is to save costs. The second reason is to focus on core competencies. However, 47% of companies outsource to solve capacity issues. [6]

Backsourcing

A survey published in 2018 showed that up to 70% of US companies had negative experiences with IT offshoring, about 25% of the companies therefore brought previously outsourced service jobs back inhouse. Backsourcing retrieves an outsourced activity, once the outsourcing contract has expired or is formally terminated. Apart from letting go of a problematic cost and quality expectations, backsourcing can also be motivated by the desire to take advantage of new market opportunities. [7] IT outsoucing contracts are supposed to provide a safety net on which both contracting parties can rely, however the need for future IT services can hardly be defined in a outsoucing contract. Ideally the contracting parties agree a mechanism to cope with changes that are not even considered in the contract. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

Outsourcing is a business practice in which companies use external providers to carry out business processes that would otherwise be handled internally, Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another.

Offshoring is the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting. Usually this refers to a company business, although state governments may also employ offshoring. More recently, technical and administrative services have been offshored.

Nearshoring, or Nearshore, is the outsourcing of business processes, especially information technology processes, to companies in a nearby country, often sharing a border with the target country. Both parties expect to benefit from one or more of the following dimensions of proximity: geographic, temporal, cultural, social, linguistic, economic, political, or historical linkages.

A business service provider is one of several categories of service provider in the business world. As opposed to an application service provider which provides application components over a computer network, the services provided by a business service provider are more in the area of infrastructure: mail delivery, building security, finance, administration, and human services.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a second-party service provider. Originally, this was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola that outsourced large segments of its supply chain.

A consulting firm or simply consultancy is a professional service firm that provides expertise and specialised labour for a fee, through the use of consultants. Consulting firms may have one employee or thousands; they may consult in a broad range of domains, for example, management, engineering, and so on.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentalog</span>

Pentalog is a privately owned business founded in 1993 by Frederic Lasnier in Orléans, France and now headquartered at Château des Hauts in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin. The company expanded over the years to offices and delivery centers in Paris, North America, Romania, Republic of Moldova (Chisinau), Mexico (Guadalajara), Germany (Frankfurt), Vietnam (Hanoi), Switzerland (Geneva) and Singapore.

Business process outsourcing to India refers to the business process outsourcing services in the outsourcing industry in India, catering mainly to Western operations of multinational corporations (MNCs).

Legal outsourcing, also known as legal process outsourcing (LPO), refers to the practice of a law firm or corporation obtaining legal support services from an outside law firm or legal support services company. When the LPO provider is based in another country, the practice is called offshoring and involves the practice of outsourcing any activity except those where personal presence or contact is required, e.g. appearances in court and face-to-face negotiations. When the LPO provider is based in the same country, the practice of outsourcing includes agency work and other services requiring a physical presence, such as court appearances. This process is one of the incidents of the larger movement towards outsourcing. The most commonly offered services have been agency work, document review, legal research and writing, drafting of pleadings and briefs, and patent services.

On-demand outsourcing is a trend in outsourcing wherein major internal operations processes of a company are being shifted to a provider that is paid for by the number of transactions involved. The business transferring the services pays for the quality, special skills and the competence of the service provider's employees. There has been an expansion of the outsourcing concept to include on-demand outsourcing. This refers to the process undertaken by business managers to adopt an outsourcing policy that ensures that the specific business and supplies including technical manpower are accessed as the need arises. It focuses a business strategy to improve its goods and services and to drive a business towards quality improvement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Softtek</span> Mexican technology company

Softtek is a Mexico-based information technology company, operating in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, the company has 15,000 associates in Mexico and abroad and is the largest private IT vendor in Latin America. The company offers application software development, testing, security and support; business process outsourcing (BPO); and IT infrastructure management, security and support to more than 400 corporations in more than 20 countries. It also acts as a value added reseller (VAR) for SAP, Microsoft, Blue Yonder, AWS and other software products. The company has trademarked the term "nearshoring" to describe the provision of outsourced services to customers in other countries that are in proximity.

Manufacturing in Mexico grew rapidly in the late 1960s with the end of the US farm labor agreement known as the bracero program. This sent many unskilled farm laborers back into the Northern border region with no source of income. As a result, the US and Mexican governments agreed to The Border Industrialization Program, which permitted US companies to assemble product in Mexico using raw materials and components from the US with reduced duties. The Border Industrialization Program became known popularly as The Maquiladora Program or shortened to The Maquila Program.

Body shopping is the practice of consultancy firms recruiting workers in order to contract their services out on a tactical short- to mid-term basis. IT services companies that practice body shopping assert that they provide real services rather than the "sham" of merely farming out professionals to overseas companies.

Software Testing Outsourcing is software testing carried out by an independent company or a group of people not directly involved in the process of software development.

Outsource Partners International (OPI) was acquired by EXL in June 2011. The acquisition marked the end of F&A outsourcing of OPI. OPI was a multinational company with headquarters in New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA. It operates from more than a dozen global locations throughout the US, UK, India, Bulgaria, and Malaysia. OPI was formed in 2002 through the acquisition of big four accounting firm's Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) division and itAccounts, a finance and accounting BPO company with an offshore F&A outsourcing facility in Bangalore, India. It offers finance, accounting and tax outsourcing services.

Sourcing advisory is the use of third-party advice during the sourcing process. As such, it may refer to advice sought during outsourcing, offshoring or global sourcing.

Microwork is a series of many small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and it is completed by many people over the Internet. Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably. The term was developed in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource.

Third-party logistics is an organization's long term commitment of outsourcing its distribution services to third-party logistics businesses.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a form of business process automation that is based on software robots (bots) or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. RPA should not be confused with artificial intelligence as it is based on automotive technology following a predefined workflow. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics.

The business process outsourcing industry in China including IT and other outsourcing services for onshore and export markets surpassed 1 trillion yuan in 2016 according to the Ministry of Commerce (MOC).

References

  1. Gibson, Pattie (2004-04-14). Administrative Office Management, Complete Course. Cengage Learning. ISBN   9781133168225.
  2. 1 2 3 Advances in Education and Management: International Symposium, ISAEBD 2011, Dalian, China, August 6-7, 2011, Proceedings, Part IV. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg. 2011. pp. 58–63. ISBN   978-3-642-23062-2.
  3. Kalindi Vora (2015). Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN   9781452943534.
  4. Erik Beulen; Pieter M.A. Ribbers, eds. (2020). The Routledge Companion to Managing Digital Outsourcing. Taylor & Francis. p. 157. ISBN   9781351037778.
  5. Vitasek, Kate (1 June 2010). "A New way to Outsource". Forbes.
  6. "Deloitte's 2016 Global Outsourcing Survey" (PDF). Deloitte. Retrieved 9 March 2020.
  7. Erik Beulen; Pieter M.A. Ribbers, eds. (2020). The Routledge Companion to Managing Digital Outsourcing. Taylor & Francis. p. 106. ISBN   9781351037778.
  8. Erik Beulen; Pieter M.A. Ribbers, eds. (2020). The Routledge Companion to Managing Digital Outsourcing. Taylor & Francis. p. 31. ISBN   9781351037778.