Outsourcing? You had better be well prepared …
Sam Clarke
Published at
For those who aspire to outsource any of your internal processes to a service partner, I advise you to stop and reflect for a moment. You are likely to be taking the decision to outsource assuming that you will at least maintain your customers’ experience and preferably even improve it. By the way, with ‘customer’ I include the process customer. However, if you outsource your process in its current operating state, you will most likely just be outsourcing the existing problems. Consequently, the issues you experience on a daily basis will be amplified to your customer. And you end up achieving the opposite effect than you intended.
Besides the obvious cultural differences that would be experienced by outsourcing, the geographical distance within process teams creates a number of interaction risks:
- no shared goal and clarity regarding overall objectives;
- barriers in communication hence issues will not be addressed right away;
- a lack of trust and understanding leading to less goodwill and more assumptions.
Research conducted by the Center for Global Leadership of the University of California, Irvine shows that an important solution to counter these risks of interaction lies in increasing the lead-time for interactions to occur. Unfortunately, for most organisations this is just not an acceptable option.
Outsource Readiness Route
Let me therefore present a way where you do not have to create this lead-time allowance, which can be as much as 10% in our experience. At R&G Global Consultants we have found that by first optimising the process we can identify an ‘Outsource Readiness Route’ that prepares your process for outsourcing. The graphic below shows the benefits our customers have experienced.
If you first optimise your business process excellence, and only then outsource the process, you will yield the most benefits. And that will serve your customers in the best possible way.
Sam Clarke is Business Process Consultant at R&G Global Consultants in the United Kingdom.
