Guide To Outsourcing And Industry Best Practices

The skills needed to produce a single medical ventilator range from fabrication, material processing and simulation to software coding, and such skills are hard to find in a single onshore organisation. Thus, to ameliorate production and meet the much-needed demand, outsourcing/offshoring, some of the parts and skills is the only viable option. Many outsourcing companies that have offshored operations in countries like India, China, Singapore and Vietnam have been devastated by the crisis. Since the global lockdown in March, companies have been failing to deliver orders due to the labour force being forced to stay home. However, although the global crisis damaged businesses, not all companies are losing money. As more people are working from home, the demand for technology that enables online group meetings has skyrocketed.

This can contribute to a high unemployment rate in the local community where the workers were laid off and affect its economy. Another issue is the impact on the remaining jobs in the factories or offices where the company laid off many workers. Stagnation of wages, uncertainty about job security, and low morale could affect the output of employees. This could eventually lead to low productivity and affect business operations.

Mr. Bryant has over 20 years of leadership experience running IT operations and governance in software, financial services, and consulting services industries. Mr. Bryant is an ITILv3 Expert, possesses a Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute , is a TOGAF9 certified Enterprise Architect, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional . Dedicated vs. shared support model – Will the supplier provide you with dedicated support resources who will learn your environment as well as your own support resources? If your company is only one of several customers being supported by the same team, you’re not going to get the kind of focused attention and consistent service you would with an in-house or dedicated team. The only way a provider can run a business that way is through truly commoditized service—and remember, the goal is always to provide differentiated, high-value service. Turnover – The way your provider treats its employees—reflected in its turnover rate—will have a direct impact on the attitude and quality of service your customers encounter when they call in.

Both parties may miscommunicate what they intend to say to each other and this could lead to misunderstanding. The average U.S. computer engineer earns 12 to 13 Offshore Software Development times their Indian counterpart, but the U.S. The increased tax revenue from corporate profits does not equal the amount lost on U.S. workers’ income taxes.

However, inherent to that system are dependencies and expectations that have been called into question by the pandemic. Such performance has fuelled politicians and policymakers to advocate for a reduction in the outsourcing-offshoring business—cementing President Trump’s call to bring the production industry back from overseas. South Africa was the most affected country in Africa, with almost 750,000 cases of COVID-19 infection by November 2020. For years, South Africa has depended on the United Kingdom to outsource medical equipment, ventilators included.

Offshoring

Hopefully, this will help you make an informed choice as to whether offshoring is a good business model for you or your company. If you decide to give offshoring a shot, then hit us up to get free expert guidance and advice on how to move forward! We’ve got a ton of experience and awesome teams of skilled IT professionals in Cebu City, Philippines.

  • The notion of ‘work from home’ is generally not supported by outsourcing companies, and they do not typically provide workers with laptops to use at home.
  • India has the largest pool of English speaking talent with multiple years of relevant experience to cater to your customized product needs without compromising on the quality.
  • It is estimated that it will cost US$ 50 trillion to keep the global temperature rise below 3.0°C by the end of the 21st century .
  • A ventilator blows air and oxygen into the patient’s lungs, preventing them from collapsing.
  • Many incidences during the ongoing pandemic pointed towards either shortages or the non-availability of various materials at the point of requirement or consumption.
  • Payroll processing was subcontracted; shipping was farmed out; so was manufacturing; companies were hired for collections, customer call centers, and employee benefits.

By 2018, China was the leading producer of CO2, 10.06 GT (28% of the total CO2 emission), with almost half to the second producer of CO2, the US (5.41 GT, 15% of the world total). The huge amount of CO2 production is attributed to the high number of offshore-outsource manufacturing companies in the country, as China is the number one destination for offshore-outsource companies. The Paris Agreement on limiting the global temperature targets a maximum increase of 1.5°C by 2100; however, the current trends in GHG production show that this goal cannot be achieved. Mitigation pathways to limit the warming by 1.5°C by the end of the century are far behind, and they have received little attention. It is estimated that it will cost US$ 50 trillion to keep the global temperature rise below 3.0°C by the end of the 21st century .

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Unprecedented interruptions to business-as-usual have quickly cascaded across industries and geographies, especially with the implementation of stay-at-home orders in all sub-Saharan countries. Lower labor costs– It is more affordable for companies in the United States to payforeign employees who have lower salariescompared to employees within the country. Offshoring will make a good business practice for business owners if offshore workers can do the same type of work as their American counterparts for much lower labor costs. This is especially important for labor-intensive businesses such as manufacturing and service jobs where reducing labor expenses can help in reducing costs of operations, increasing revenues, and maximizing income. In the first quarter of 2020 (the COVID-19 pandemic), the impact on the production and shipment of pharmaceuticals was not felt.

Best Practices of Offshoring

Work is often outsourced to countries where laws are not as protective of workers and the environment as in the U.S. We ultimately pay for those oversights in human rights abuses and further damage to the planet. New, more sophisticated jobs will be created in America to fill the void now that the less skilled jobs have been sent overseas. Much of the revenue earned abroad returns to this country in wages for other employees, investment in research and development, profits for shareholders, and taxes for the government. OpenXcell ensures reliable access to your resources along with the highest level of security for your confidential data and business solution data. Openxcell has a product engineering team of experts for innovating, designing, developing, testing, and deploying software completely.

Working With An Offshore Software Development Team

But I also like the idea of creating more opportunity for domestic students to make a buck and gain invaluable experience. That’s a hard point to argue against, but America would nevertheless appear unfair in its trade practices, were it to go protectionist on outsourcing. Better, perhaps, to focus on maintaining an edge on work higher up on the value chain. Prior to joining Franklin Bank, Mr. Bryant served as the Global Infrastructure Director for Resolution Performance Products LLP, a coatings industry leader and a spin-off of Shell Chemical.

Best Practices of Offshoring

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Pandemic Offshore

Due to the unifying factor of competitiveness, offshoring and outsourcing can be entangled, leaving a very thin line to separate them—especially in the service sector. Offshoring-outsourcing can involve captive outsourcing, nearshoring, and onshoring, depending on the location of the firm. By 2019, India was the number one destination for most offshore-outsourcing activities, owing to its financial attractiveness and skilled labour .

Also, the disruption to the distribution of outsourced malaria-prevention products, such as insecticidal nets, could lead to an increase in malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the continuation of offshore-outsource production and research services equally increase morbidity and COVID-19 mortality. Offshoring is the act of delegating part of business work to an external and/or internal entity that is located somewhere else. Outsourcing involves obtaining certain services/products from a third party, while offshoring companies relocate some of their services/product lines to regions that offer them a competitive advantage.

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The gaps in communication times could also affect the decision-making process. For example, the offshore country needs to make an important decision about a project, but it cannot move forward without consulting with the home country. The time it takes to wait and get a decision could affect urgent tasks that are time-sensitive and deadline driven. Quality control problems– For manufacturing offshoring, ensuring that a product is strictly builtaccording to the parent company’s standardsmay be a challenge under the offshore location’s manufacturing set-up. Even if the parent company provides quality guidelines, the differences in working culture, language, logistics and supply chains of the country where the factory is located may affect the quality of the finished product. Other countries were able to manufacture goods more cheaply than in the U.S. because of lower standards of living and less restrictive laws and environmental regulations.

The only thing that’s really changed is the global regions where outsourcing firms can be found, and the most commonly outsourced business processes. In this chapter, we present how medical industry and other industries have been impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to offshoring-outsourcing business. COVID-19 pandemic resulted in border closure forcing nations to rethink of onshoring; in this chapter we present the tradeoffs between outsourcing-offshoring and onshoring. In outsourcing, specialized companies provide their services to client companies at a lower cost than the client companies would ultimately incur doing the work in-house.

Time zone adjustments– The time zone differences between the home country and offshore country can be a problem for both manufacturing and services offshoring. It can be challenging for the management in both countries to organize shift patterns that are not disruptive for both sides. This can be an issue when both sides have to find an appropriate time to talk to each other.

The processing operations were sent to the likes of China and India, countries that are now experiencing the worst air pollution ever . Though outsourcing-offshoring countries have paid some price in terms of job losses, the benefit of improved air and water quality somewhat outweighs the price. The pandemic has been a wake-up call for outsourcing-offshoring economies; why was the US manufacturing industry unable to supply the necessary materials like face masks, medical ventilators, and PPE? Taken together, the US and other advanced industrial economies have evolved a highly efficient and productive product manufacturing-and-delivery system that provides them with a cornucopia of products at relatively low costs.

During the peak of the pandemic in Europe , Penlon, the leading manufacturer of ventilators in the UK, could not supply SA, citing the incapability of the company to produce extra ventilators for the SA community. The situation reflects the dangers of relying on offshoring or outsourcing vital equipment. However, once SA was able to acquire the patent rights to produce the ventilators, the country did have the necessary skills to produce them. It took weeks for the SA government to find a local ‘peep valve’ manufacturer, a vital component that allows patients to exhale.

Scale-up/scale-down – Will your service provider allow you to scale up and scale down to meet peaks and valleys of demand? Be careful not to sign up for a linear volume-based service charge or you could end up with large unplanned cost variances. This is the fourth blog in our five-part series on “Delivering a World Class Service Desk.” In our last installment, we presented five metrics to help you track your performance and make sure you’re hitting the right targets. In this blog, we’ll tackle the perennial questions of whether to outsource or offshore your service desk—and how to make sure it doesn’t impair your effectiveness. A successful offshore team begins by choosing the right people for the right job role.

However, investing in onshore business calls for a tradeoff, which some countries cannot afford. Many countries lack skilled labour , and where available, it is too expensive making onshore an expensive venture. Besides, promoting manufacturing companies means increased air pollution and greenhouse gases that are responsible for 4.2–7.0 million premature deaths every year, and which costs $4.6 trillion per year. Therefore, for countries to survive in the era of a pandemic, the best alternative is to build strong ties with offshore-outsource nations. Most people, especially in many developing nations, live on the poverty line, depending mainly on COVID-19-impacted industries such as travel, tourism, hospitality, call centres, and manufacturing. However, the pandemic presents a catch-22 situation for those nations that provide offshoring and outsourcing business services to multinationals.

Best Practices For Dealing With Offshore Software Development

If you are a business owner thinking about offshoring your company’s business process, the first thing you might ask yourself is “what are the pros and cons of offshoring? ” Other questions you might have in mind are “what are the offshoring benefits and disadvantages? ”, “should you establish a foreign subsidiary or hire an offshore services company? Thus, this requires creating an imminent negative or positive restructuring of offshore-outsource strategies. For example, the several research studies that required clinical trials and the collaborative participation of multinationals in the fight against diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, and leishmaniasis have been suspended. The suspension threatens livelihoods that relied on outsourced and offshored clinical services, and the research skills to reduce the impact of such diseases in society .

Pros And Cons Of Offshoring

There is no doubt that the lack of PPE puts health workers and patients at high risk of being infected and infecting others with COVID-19 . The outsourcing-offshoring industries do not lend themselves to working from home. For example, because of security concerns, some companies even ask employees to leave even their pens and pencils outside the office. Specifically, the companies that relied on outsourcing firms for their testing services were left in a lurch.

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The transport of raw materials from Uganda, the Philippines or Vietnam to outsourcing-offshoring economies could mean incurring high transportation costs. Besides, the stringent environmental laws in developed economies could make the processing of such materials practically impossible. Before the UK and US started practising outsourcing-offshoring of some types of business, they had some of the worst air pollutions in the world.

The largest share of the revenue for this industry came from the Americas, followed by Europe and the Middle East, while Africa barely featured. The cardinal role of outsourcing-offshoring is to cut costs such as taxes and production. Some other drivers include enabling a focus on the core business and solving capacity issues. However, https://globalcloudteam.com/ since the outbreak of COVID-19, many industries have since been affected, causing slack in outsourcing/offshoring. Effect on jobs in the home country– The parent company may have to terminate the employment of its local workers if it offshores their jobs to overseas subsidiaries or hire the services of offshore services providers.

In response one might argue that “for the sake of profit” is a loaded expression, and that the guiding principle is one of economy—doing what makes sense for investors and also for consumers by reducing operational costs. If the offshore option is available, decision-makers have to consider it the way they would other options; if offshoring is prudent and cost-effective, CIOs may have no choice but to outsource. And besides, America has been lecturing about the benefits of free trade as against protection for a very long time. It would be unseemly and counterproductive to change its tune when its own industry or labor force began to feel the pinch of competition. The emission of CO2 causes global warming and erratic Climate changes (e.g. flooding).