Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Outsourcing

Outsourcing today is being led by the combination of expertise in the following three areas.
1. Technical Internet expertise,
2. Paper handling and
3. Data capture expertise.
The outline of the software outsourcing process can be understood as getting the code from outside. The trend has been such that the businesses who are producers are themselves using the outsourced services. Today it is not regarded as a different thing using the term outsourcing as it was once when it was not known to everyone. Also one of the main factors to increase the trend is that the more than the developing countries asking for the work, there is a push by the developed nations to get their work outsourced.
Today, an estimated 1.6 million U.S. firms are outsourcing strategic business functions to over 146,000 suppliers, with total expenditures estimated at $108 billion per year. The growth of outsourcing confirms the continuing shift in the way America does business.
The companies today are focused on to what they can and should provide to the customers for getting themselves valued among the customers. This is important in a long run and if the companies want to survive and keep ahead of the others.
There has been process improvement in the information technology and also the complexity among the process is reduced thereby making the costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks affordable. Companies who can alternatively produce, have understood that it will be better to get the task done from the providers who can perform the same at lower cost and greater value while they can themselves concentrate on their core functionality.
This above approach can be summarized as - focusing on core activities, selectively outsourcing others - crossing industry boundaries. For example, manufacturers use value-added distributors to increase customer responsiveness and supply-chain agility.