Understanding an enterprise’s business landscape holds the key to unlock the possibilities of successful outsourcing. Here the business landscape refers to a company’s offerings in the market in terms of its products and services, the market positioning of these two in comparison to a competitor. It is important to clearly understand the business ecosystem in which a company is functioning so that business owners and enterprises can clearly locate the strengths and the weaknesses. Outsourcing is a popular strategy of delivering competitive advantage to an organization and as a result, enterprises across different industry verticals are adopting it at large. Apart from the cost and resource optimization, outsourcing definitely strengthens the core product and the service line by streamlining the secondary and the allied functions that form the backbone of the core functions. Having said so, it is critical to understand that two companies sharing the same space might approach outsourcing in a different way. They might outsource different functions depending upon their organization’s capabilities. Whether, an enterprise decides to outsource to India or some other country, it has to understand the metrics associated with it.
The first and foremost consideration before outsourcing is the business functions that need expert tending. Let us understand through an example. Take the case of an enterprise that is prying big in the internet marketing business. In internet marketing, data collection, data analysis, online marketing strategies are very important. Slackening in any one of these can affect the overall business. Therefore, to maintain a balanced performance in each of these functions, the enterprise has to identify core functions and secondary functions. Once this understanding is in place then it is easier to outsource. For this enterprise, data mining was an activity that seemed less productive, more time consuming and ill managed. Hence, it decided to outsource data mining to the service providers.
This not only saved time but also turned the process into something productive and impactful to the product or service life cycle.
The next important thing that should be considered before outsourcing is the available infrastructure and work force within the organization. Let us continue with the same example. It is not possible for an enterprise to have specialized resources for different functions along with the latest tools and technologies required. Outsourcing data mining would serve to be a smart move because the internet marketing enterprise might not have the requisite tools for data mining as technology needs constant up gradation. There are a lot of things that an enterprise needs to consider before outsourcing but the first and foremost thing is to analyze the business and its priorities.