Understand what you want to accomplish is critical to a successful outsourcing company. Although there are many who claim to offer offshoring procurement services, the fact is that only includes the outsourcing company can determine the what, who and when of any service project offshore.

To this end, a company needs to understand why an outsourcing project. He of course, is what will be outsourced. It is not enough to simply say that we are gong to outsource IT services technology and human resources, or any other facet of the business. To determine which means a deep understanding of how your company is currently engaged in this work.

So the first order of business is considering outsourcing:

Define the current process. This should be done with an understanding of the needs. The requirements should be clearly defined in such a way as to eliminate ambiguity and offer a method of measurement. Fast service is not a metric. Responding to and resolving a specific type of customer research within x number of minutes is a requirement.

The exercise of defining the current process for understanding the details of what you really need. This information will be needed when / if the transfer of this process to its new outsourcing partner.

Now would also be a good time to do a cost benefit analysis on the proposed process. This allows the business to have a robust estimate of the actual operating costs of the process under consideration for outsourcing. By doing this analysis, be sure to honestly consider all costs involved.

I was involved with a major technology company that insisted that any costs that can not be quantified easily be marginalized or simply ignored. Underlying the decision to outsource its internal support department thousands of people on the basis of a simple statement, "The support call will cost $ 25 to $ 6." The problem was that it covers all costs. Although it requires calls to be answered within a specified period of time, not set a time for resolutions. When supported at home, an engineer could call for support and a decision within hours. After transfer, however, that the same call made at least 3 days and sometimes more than a week to its resolution. The cost in lost productivity for the company because the engineer did not have access to your files and e-mail were never considered in the simple statement above. If the total costs were considered, the savings would have been much less significant.


Then, the key suggestion is to know your process and costs before considering any proposed relocation. To be armed with solid information, it is then possible to select the right external partner and make a good decision for the business.