What should companies outsource

Stakeholders should also clearly understand their role in the process. Communication channels between all parties should remain open. Strategic objectives, such as outsourcing initiatives, must come from the top echelon of a company. Senior management must articulate the goals and objectives of the outsourcing initiative, and they must communicate how the process will benefit the organization.

Ensuring the success of outsourcing initiatives does not stop when the ink has dried on the contract, so executive leadership must continue to be engaged as contract work continues.

Just as executives should remain engaged with the goals of outsourcing throughout the contract work, the person managing the contractors must continue to cultivate a good relationship with the contractors.

This includes checking in on work, ensuring good morale, and addressing any issues that arise. Not only should there be a clearly defined escalation procedure, but senior management should meet at appropriate intervals to discuss the outsourcing relationship. Meetings also should be held at the operational level to address the working of the outsourcing contract in practice, to identify and resolve any problems that have been encountered, and to agree on changes to ensure continued satisfaction.

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

Measure ad performance. Google is expanding this even further and in addition to email support, also offering phone support with staff around the world. These individuals are seamlessly blended into their inhouse support team, providing clients with improved response times at a reasonable cost.

All these make Google a perfect outsourcing example to illustrate the reasons for outsourcing. Reasons for outsourcing: accessing the pool of talents and skills, solving capacity issues, improving quality, reducing costs. Google understood that size is irrelevant when it comes to outsourcing. By understanding what work can be outsourced and what work needs to stay inhouse, Google was able to maximize its budget utilization.

When talking about online eCommerce firms, several names come to mind. You have Amazon and eBay, of course, but a company that has quickly come to the fore is Alibaba. Alibaba is another example of companies that outsource, but unlike Amazon and eBay, Alibaba is based in China, which makes the challenges of outsourcing somewhat different.

In most cases, companies that outsource do so based on cost. Often this is to lower-cost countries like India, China, and the Far East. However, when the company itself is based in that region, the paradigm shifts. Alibaba understood that while they could keep their manufacturing and resource costs low locally, the skills they needed to grow were not available at scale in their region. With this in mind, Alibaba started looking for partners and outsourcers early in their development across a host of different projects and found many of the skills they needed in the US.

By outsourcing web development to the US, the site flourished and grew at an astronomical pace. Reasons for outsourcing: accessing the pool of talents and skills, improving quality, greater focus on core business. The main point to pick up on here is that you need to have an understanding of your requirements.

By knowing what skills were lacking in their region, Alibaba was quickly able to find resources elsewhere able to accomplish the tasks they needed to get done. WhatsApp is a well-known name when it comes to communication. However, WhatsApp did not start out as the company you see today. When thinking about companies that outsource, WhatsApp is a good example of outsourcing as it has been doing it from the very beginning. As early as , WhatsApp was a small organization with only 30 full-time employees and five part-timers.

Based out of Mountain View California, they understood that if they wanted to grow, they needed to keep costs down. For WhatsApp, Russia was the answer, and they sourced development resources from Russia for a small fraction of what they would have had to pay in the US.

The WhatsApp team understood that geography should not be a boundary. To that end, they identified what they needed to grow and then looked globally for where they could gain access to those skills cost-effectively. For project managers and others interested in a tool to keep tasks on target, Basecamp is well known. Basecamp started out small, and while they are prevalent in the project management field, they maintained a small footprint of inhouse resources.

Basecamp actually understood that trying to do everything by themselves was not the right strategy for the organization. They saw that while their tool was being used by others to manage projects and work, they were having problems internally with workflow and client support. It can also be a great deal more efficient to outsource customer support than it is to maintain a qualified support staff, especially for product-based companies.

Resource Nation allows companies to get quotes from pre-screened business solution sources. Accounting firms or individuals can help with many financial services including bookkeeping, invoicing and accounts payable and receivable, as well as financial reporting, analysis and planning.

Outsourcing payroll processing alone can save considerable hours, headaches and dollars. Many financial contractors will bundle these tasks for even greater savings. Where to find help : BookkeepingHelp is a popular source of experienced financial professionals. This is one area to be very careful when outsourcing.

Effective marketing determines how both brand and company reputation are perceived in the marketplace. A marketing firm or consultant can often provide an outside perspective that an internal marketing staff cannot. Professional freelance writers can develop higher-quality, polished content that will improve marketing efforts. Website design, brand development, press releases and online marketing duties such as social media , blogging and search engine optimization are good candidates for outsourcing as well.

Where to find help : Guru and Elance are two of the best-known sources of freelance contractors. They cover many areas of outsourcing, but excel in the areas of writing and design. It can be extremely expensive to handle IT operations in-house. The average business has limited ability and knowledge to manage all of its IT needs. Full-time employees are tied to certain working schedules, which means that the work stops once the shift finishes. Outsourcing provides businesses with dynamic and intuitive platforms that will allow you to easily oversee the progress of work, what has been completed, due dates and payment schedules.

By having this visibility of what is going on you can more easily identify ways of streamlining the process. Technology is evolving day by day, with big data, cloud computing, and marketing automation increasing in popularity.

Why waste time training people in these technologies when you can outsource them to people who already have years of experience? Outsourcing enables you to plan and execute more targeted projects that would be impossible to take on otherwise.

Working with a reliable outsourcing partner will give you peace of mind, knowing that the tasks are being handled efficiently and effectively; even without your guidance. Whatever your reasons for wanting to outsource, the key to a successful outcome is to be clear on the scope of activities you wish to outsource and choose a partner who you trust to deliver the results you desire. We recommend that you start small and gradually expand the scope of work once you have gained the necessary confidence and trust in your provider.

Phil is a co-founder of Leave Dates, a staff holiday planner to help companies manage their leave and absence more efficiently. He saw lots of companies managing this manually, even those with expensive HR systems, so he decided to solve the problem with simple, easy to use software which is free for small companies. Your email address will not be published.