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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

Assign cases

Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases

Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

Specialist-generalist

Consider to deepen or broaden the skills of resources

Apply triage

Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities

Green Compensation

Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.

Offer Customer self-service

Offer customers the possibility to serve themselves

Quality-based task assignment

Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics

Cost-based task assignment

Delegate tasks according to resource cost

Teamwork-based assignment

Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity

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