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Outsource activities

Delegate and optimize your operations

A strategy of entrusting specific business activities to external service providers for cost savings and enhanced focus on core competencies

Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)

category: External Environment
class: Rules for External Parties
frameworkAspect: External
perspective: organizational/resource

Description

Outsourcing of Business Activities is a strategic approach in which organizations delegate certain non-core business activities to external service providers. This pattern enables companies to streamline their operations, reduce costs, and increase efficiency by leveraging the expertise and economies of scale offered by specialized outsourcing partners. By outsourcing non-core functions, organizations can free up internal resources, allowing them to concentrate on their core competencies and strategic initiatives.

Outsourcing of Business Activities offers several advantages. Firstly, it allows companies to access specialized skills and knowledge that may not be readily available in-house, leading to improved service quality and productivity. Secondly, outsourcing often leads to cost savings through reduced labor, infrastructure, and operational expenses. Additionally, outsourcing providers can offer scalability and flexibility, allowing businesses to quickly adapt to changing market demands. It is crucial, however, to carefully select and manage outsourcing partners to ensure alignment with business goals and maintain effective communication and collaboration.

Performance considerations

The primary objective of outsourcing tasks is to achieve cost reduction. However, a potential downside is the potential decline in quality. Additionally, outsourcing necessitates increased coordination efforts and can introduce complexities to the workflow.

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Foundational free Patterns

Appoint case managers

Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Deploy extra resources

If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources

Fail Early

Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.

Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

Generalize your process

Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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