The idea that outsourcing can improve your business is nothing new. But how you outsource matters a lot. While there are some tasks you’ll want to keep in-house, these days there are many that you can outsource further afield.
In this post, we take a look at some of the outsourcing models that can transform your business – and why they work so well.
Managed Service Outsourcing
Not all companies have expertise in managing their assets and resources.
Take their premises, for instance. Brands that sell lanyards or digital marketing services usually don’t know a great deal about how to look after a large facility and keep it operating smoothly.
Technically, they could bring the expertise to do so in-house. But that would be costly, inefficient, and a hassle. In most situations, it is much better to get somebody else to do the hard work since they are so much more efficient at allocating their time and resources.
Out-Tasking
The same applies to the concept of outasking. The idea here isn’t to manage a service, per se, but instead to perform tasks that you don’t need to bring in-house.
So, how does it work?
It’s actually pretty simple. Let’s say that there’s some repetitive task that you need to perform in your business to provide services to your customers – something that happens a lot.
Instead of hiring somebody to do it in-house, you get professionals outside your organization to do it for you. These individuals tend to be significantly faster and better equipped for the service than people you could get in-house. And so they allow you to cut the cost of your operations substantially.
Manufacturing
The idea of outsourcing your manufacturing to a third party seems a little strange when you first hear it. But it actually makes a lot of economic sense.
Take the consumer electronics industry, for instance. Most of the brands that people know and love, like Apple, don’t make their products from scratch. Instead, they all go to one of the top electronics manufacturing companies in the world and get them to do it for them. And these are companies with a lot of cash to spend!
The reason they do it again comes down to efficiency. It would be too expensive, for instance, for Apple to set up and monitor its own production lines. So it takes advantage of those that already exist, using them as a kind of service as it needs them.
Staff
Some companies also outsource the process of acquiring staff.
Usually, this goes as follows: a company has a core team of full-time employees who manage the day-to-day running of the firm. It then establishes a relationship with a specialist recruiter that provides seasonal or intermittent labor as required.
Going through this process in-house, again, would be prohibitively expensive. Trying to decrease, increase and then decrease employee numbers all the time could be a challenge. But recruiters deal with these issues all the time and have systems in place to make them work. This way, they can provide labor when required, hassle-free.