Understanding The Intricacies Of Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business and service is essentially sub-contracting work to a third party. In fact, to outsource is to shift a part or a major part of ones immediate and future work burden to another place, preferably to other countries and not foregoing, but gaining all the additional benefits resulting out of this. It is also one way of distributing risks in order to make yourself worthy of the cause you have undertaken to do. Outsourcing is a strategic decision and in cases of business organizations it has to be approved by the Board of Directors. In other cases both individual and otherwise it is a significant shift in strategy to reap the bountiful benefits in the ongoing process of globalization.

The reasons why outsourcing is done are numerous and varies from business to business and individual to individual as the case may be. Yet the main reason for opting for outsourcing are cost savings, improvement of quality of goods and services, acquiring wider knowledge base, avoiding fringe benefits to workers, operational expertise, access to a larger talent pool, industry specific specialization, acting as a catalyst for change and expansion and standardization of business practices.

Although there are myriad outsourcing functions, the most noticeable are the Information Technology outsourcing (IT), Business Process outsourcing (BPO), call centre outsourcing, human resource outsourcing, financial and accounting outsourcing, claims processing outsourcing. Besides, there is payroll, billing and data entry work outsourced with deadlines in order to be made available for business the very next day of office work.

Of late activists in host countries are raising objections to outsourcing as it results in a lot of jobs going elsewhere. But when one considers the benefits that accrue to a host country in the long run then these objections hold no standing. Not only do countries outsourcing work benefit from the best of expertise in relevant fields they also save on money otherwise spent on perks and fringe benefits that are a part of a full time employee package. It is generally realized even in the most conservative areas that in an era of competition and globalization and fast changing technologies, outsourcing merely doesn’t mean shifting of jobs from higher wages to lower wages, but that it actually means reaping in the benefits of best product makes and services for improving the social structure of the society as a whole and its own way to think out a solution to the various problems it faces.