Growth in outsourcing significance
Outsourcing becomes more and more popular
Increasingly companies decide to implement the relevant areas of their business in the form of services provided by specialized external suppliers.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) gathered, at World Economic Forum in Davos, opinions on outsourcing from the presidents and directors from 19 countries in the world - both clients (226 respondents) and suppliers (66) of services of this type. The agency presented them in a report titled "Outsourcing Comes of Age: The Rise of Collaborative Partnering".
The vast majority (87%) of respondents representing outsourcing clients believes that it provides the benefits projected in the business plans. Moreover, it entered so strongly into the economic bloodstream, that 91% of customers - both satisfied and dissatisfied with outsourcing - claims that they will use these services again in the near future.
The main reasons why companies decide to outsource are:
- Lower costs (76%),
- Access to talented workers (70%),
- Transfer of activities, that are not main areas of company expertise, to professionals (63%),
- Increase in flexibility of the business model (56%),
- Improving relations with customers (42%),
- Development of new products and services (37%),
- Geographic expansion (33%).
The report predicts the continuous rise of outsourced services significance. Many (53%) of respondents also transfer outside the most important (in the opinion of those surveyed-ones) areas of their activity and this phenomenon will gain in strength. Also - a tendency to transfer more business segments to external service providers - is visible. For example, companies that have already transfered payments support to the outside are also deciding now to outsource budgeting, financial forecasting and reporting services.
Mostly transferred outside are IT services (57%). But IT quickly loses share to such strategic areas as production/supply of key products and services or research and development business branch. Overall, 70% of companies - in the form of contracts for external service - perform an action which objectively can be considered as strategic activity: 53% - production of key products and/or providing services, 33% - sales and marketing, 32% - research and development, increasing innovativeness. Particularly fast development over the next five years is credited to outsourcing of production and research and development enterprises. External support for research and development departments will be mostly used by companies in the sectors of IT, media and telecommunications.
Szymon Augustyniak, CIO, 2007 (more: http://www.cxo.pl/news/113394.html).