Information technology outsourcing, legal process outsourcing, recruitment process outsourcing, engineering process outsourcing. What can’t you outsource?
What are outsourcing services?
Outsourcing services are business built around providing a function-as-a-service to their clients. There was a time, in years gone by, that a business provided all of it’s own processes internally, from core business to ancillary functions, everything was in-house. This was the era of secretaries who conducted payroll, directors who were also legal and senior sales, HR who were also PR, the list goes on. As time moved on, the requirements of these roles became more complex as technology progressed, this made wearing multiple hats impossible.
Worse yet, in large businesses the legal and regulatory compliance requirements often caused these ancillary processes to become bloated and inefficient. Outsourcing services, sometimes called business outsourcing are specialised providers and facilitators of single functions such as information technology outsourcing. The purpose of outsourcing is to allow businesses to shift their focus back to their core value proposition, to do what they do best.
What types of outsourcing services exist?
It would be practically impossible to provide an exhaustive list of business functions and processes accommodated by business outsourcing services. The most common types of business process outsourcing are:
- Information technology outsourcing
- Legal process outsourcing
- Recruitment process outsourcing
- Human resource outsourcing
- Public relations outsourcing
- Marketing process outsourcing
- Sales outsourcing
- Website development outsourcing
- Business development outsourcing
- Engineering process outsourcing
What are the benefits of outsourcing?
There are several reasons why a company should consider business outsourcing as a growth solution.
• Reduce cost overheads
With an outsourcing service you only pay for what you use, this means that you effectively have zero down-time, staff are either working for you or not costing you money. In addition to reduced staffing requirements, this free’s up other staff, less staff for HR to support, less machines for IT to support, less floor space to rent, less floor space to pay for janitorial services.
• Adaptability
Because outsourcing services are entire companies of specialised staff, they have a lot more professional capacity than an in-house team. What does this mean for you? If you are utilising information technology outsourcing and you want to launch a new IT project but are in middle of a major software rollout already, no issue, you can expand and contract the support size and number of IT teams at short notice. Your competitors have to wait till they have capacity, but you have capacity on demand.
• Specialization
Outsourcing services only have serve one purpose, this means they have a lot of staff for that purpose. Information technology outsourcing firms have teams dedicated to each service they provide, this means they have staff with deep knowledge on specific issues. Because they have so many staff they have this deep level knowledge over a wide range of area’s, which means they have both breadth and depth; the type of specialization that an internal team cannot match.
• Scalability
Much like specialization, because these are business built around a single service they have a lot of staff available. This means that any time you need to increase capacity, you can increase that capacity at very short notice. Likewise, once the surge in demand has decreased you can down-scale your teams and no longer pay for those staff. With specialization and scalability combined you can out-manoeuvre your competition and respond faster to opportunities and threats.
• Support
Get the support you need, when you need it. Outsourcing services are large, dynamic organisations to serve a single purpose. Their business goal is to support your business’s function. As a direct result of this, most business outsourcing providers offer various packages of extended support, often with capacity for 24/7 assistance. Where this would usually be over-time and penalty work for an in-house team, it’s often ‘all in a days work’ for an outsourcing service.
Should you outsource?
It’s clear that as the depth of knowledge specialization increases with the ever-advancing complexity of technology that it’s not realistic for a business to provide for all of their own functionality internally. The only model that makes sense is to adapt a more specialized, more agile and more scalable team through leveraging the power that is outsourcing. Don’t be beaten by your competition, enhance your businesses competitiveness today contact <business name> now and begin the conversation about how we can benefit you.
