Outsourcing can mean many things but the simplest explanation is that outsourcing is asking another company to do a job or perform a service that your company could do, but for some reason, chooses not to do. The main driver for outsourcing is normally cost; to decrease the cost of production of goods or decrease the cost of providing a service.
Outsourcing helps you to discover the real benefits and problems of outsourcing, and helps you decide if it will work for you.
Outsourcing is part of Nelson Croom's Issues and Debates suite of learning. Issues and Debates courses stimulate intelligent dialogue and debate and provide a valuable and evolving resource of professional knowledge and experience. These courses are topical, practical and highly relevant to today’s changing market. Each module is split into two activities: Understanding the issues and Putting it into practice. The first encourages you to think about a topic, drawing on your own professional experience and knowledge. The second helps you to put ideas and/or theories into practice as part of your day-to-day work.
Course overview
Introduction
- What is outsourcing?
- What is normally outsourced?
- Outsourcing in different industries
The benefits and problems
- Financial costs and benefits of outsourcing
- Indirect costs and benefits of outsourcing
- The problems of outsourcing
- Virtual companies
Controlling outsourcing
- Outsourcing contracts
- How to monitor your outsourcing partner
- What to do if things go wrong
Practicalities
- Contacting outsourcers
- Choosing between different outsourcers
- Establishing the SLA
- Setting review dates
- Internal monitoring of outsourcers
Will outsourcing work for us?
- What can we outsource?
- Why is outsourcing being considered?
- What does your company do well?
- Further analysis
- What can be outsourced?
- Summarising the detail
- Are there cost savings to be obtained from
outsourcing?
- What will stop outsourcing?