As well as having this column here, for the last couple of months I have also been writing a blog on the Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) website (www.sig.org) and I thought it was about time I introduced Outsource readers to that blog - which you can read via this page.
There’s a new twist on March Madness, at least in the United Kingdom's IT services world, as the UK has officially triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty advancing Britain’s separation from the European Union. This blows open the future of the EU and, among the many other oft-discussed prognostications, challenges the whole basis of IT outsourcing services delivered between the UK and the EU.
Wow! Isn’t it amazing how quickly things change? In the early 2000s, the very pinnacle of outsourcing was Walmart. Walmart didn’t outsource its own operations. Instead, it made history by working with offshore suppliers, introducing American consumers to low-cost Chinese goods. Consumers fell in love with the low prices, and Walmart grew to 14,000 stores, becoming the biggest corporation in America.
Paul J. Zak is answering age-old questions about the evolutionary and scientific - actually neuroscientific - basis for identifying and establishing trust. For example, why do people trust each other in the first place? Is there a natural inclination to trust? Does location and/or ethnicity matter when it comes to trust? What does this mean for businesses and their employee relations?
Trust is at the root of all successful outsourcing partnerships. Without trust between all parties, commercial relationships can break down. And as I’m sure you know it’s far more expensive to get new business in the door or find new partners to work with; than it is to keep the status quo.
So how can outsourcers build and maintain trust? I may be biased but I firmly believe that the availability of technology that provides round the clock oversight is the answer.
Recent stories by, amongst others, the BBC detailing large, well-organised and presumably very profitable scamming organisations targeting UK TalkTalk customers have hardly helped the already-lowly reputation of offshore contact centres - but may unfortunately be only the tip of a perilous iceberg.
In today’s business climate, it is innovation levels coupled with speed to market that will determine a company’s success. This was one of the reasons why, in 2016, we saw more interest in trends around optimising business processes – from automation to the as-a-service ecosystem. Businesses are looking to make the most not just of their employed staff, but also of their technology and the pure raw data that they hold.
Congratulations! It’s been three years since you decided to outsource accounts payable. Or, accounts receivable, or customer care, or payroll, or HR, or procurement, or any one of a dozen business process functions typically outsourced, in part or in full. You’ve finally stabilised operations, established consistent market standard processes, addressed the fears from the field, started realising those projected savings, and convinced IT that it is possible to improve response time without creating a horrific security breach.
"There has got to be a better way!" That’s the common lament from all aspects of the healthcare industry from providers, payers, and patients alike when talking about the relationship between those three parties. It not unusual to hear complaints like, “misaligned financial incentives”, the “tyranny of the 15-minute visit”, or it’s an “unsustainable system”.
As the drone flew over the factory in North Carolina and captured pictures and videos both inside and outside the factory, little did the company whose factory was being photographed realise that their practices would be questioned. Here is a factory that processes pig meat. The way the factory is designed is to optimise the number of pigs and the weight of these in order to get maximum production out of it. So, what is wrong with all this?
In a multi-partner service delivery model, transparency and visibility are essential to an effective security and supplier risk management (SRM) strategy. Yet a wide range of evidence suggests that this transparency is sorely lacking in many cases. According to a study by the independent Ponemon Institute, 73 per cent of suppliers that experience a data breach don’t notify other vendors in the supply chain, while more than a third (37 per cent) of suppliers don’t notify their customers.
Ever since the 2016 elections, America’s outsourced manufacturing has consistently been front-page news. Now news stories are shifting towards the larger world of foreign imports, rather than just outsourcing. That means new policies and taxes that will impact, well, just about everything! That means all consumer goods, cars, electronics and a lot more. But what about... cartoons? Yeah… what about the Saturday morning ghetto, Hanna-Barbera, The Simpsons, and the Cartoon Network?
As regulations and consumer pressures shift and organisations are increasingly exposed to risk – reputational and beyond – the procurement industry faces a critical juncture. This dynamic has created a business environment where sustainable procurement programs are no longer just nice to have, but an integral organisational function that is responsible for protecting and improving brand reputation, driving revenue and mitigating business risk.
John Wanamaker once commented, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” Likely this is often said of marketing as a whole - and in fairness, applies to other business functions as well. Have you struggled with this conundrum when considering your sourcing options for marketing spend? Proper mechanisms to track performance, ROI, and effectiveness need to be in place to ensure that the money spent is adding value and not being spent because you have always done it that way.
Over the last two decades I have had the opportunity to work with some of the largest (as well as mid-sized) enterprises who had outsourced their IT work to offshore based teams. The offshore teams themselves were either part of service providers who were domestic companies out of North America/Europe, or part of providers who were headquartered out of India (with largely a sales presence in North America/Europe).
