The Advantages and Disadvantages of Outsourcing

What are the advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing in the global marketplace?

In these times of great globalization where many countries have erased their borders when it comes to trade outsourcing has become an option for many companies. Whether or not to outsource is a key question that companies must consider. According to the Pros and Cons of Outsourcing, “The decision to outsource or not is a matter of finding the right balance-the balance between managing labor costs, workflow, employee capabilities, customer commitments, core competencies, and even short- and long-term risks.” (Motley-Saunders, p.1) There are many advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing. These advantages and disadvantages will be discussed in this paper.

There are many advantages of outsourcing. Many companies like to outsource because they cannot afford to hire people with the expertise to do it internally. Therefore outsourcing can help reduce cost because the company doesn’t have to increase their payroll because they can spend less by outsourcing certain contracts. Looking from a business standpoint, all companies want what is the best for the company and therefore expertise is needed and sometimes a company may have to get expert help by outsourcing. With increased competition in our global economy, outsourcing will help companies by giving them a chance to focus on other driving factors that will increase the company’s performance.

Outsourcing offers a different perspective other than that of the company’s. This will help the company by ensuring that there will not be any bias or favoritism because the company that handles the outsourcing is an external company and therefore hold no bias. This will ensure more effective decision making since the outsourcing company can perform its duties without any personal preference or bias. Another perspective can also open the door to many new ideas.

Outsourcing will enable the company to save money because with outsourcing the company only seeks external help when they need it so unlike internal workers who are always being paid whether or not the workload is heavy or not outsourcing is only sought when help is needed. Companies who outsource are able to more efficiently use their resources and take on bigger tasks because they are able to lean on external assistance and expertise.

With different markets in the global market, a lot of money can be saved by outsourcing to countries where it may cost less to get assistance and expertise. Companies can save a lot of money if they outsource by lowering their cost of labor by giving out contracts to companies in countries where labor is cheaper.

Outsourcing provides companies with more cost effective ways to do business and it also saves companies a lot of time because they can focus their attention on other areas of the business. Outsourcing also reduces operational costs because less will be spent to outsource then to setup a department of experts on a specific area of expertise. According to John Bugh, “The more back-office functions that can be offloaded, the more effective the organization. An important facet of business process outsourcing is its ability to free top executives from some of their more mundane day-to-day process management responsibilities. On average, executives spend 80 percent of their time in the management of details and only 20 percent on formulating strategy. But when a business process is outsourced, this ratio can be easily reversed.” (John Bugh, p.40)

Outsourcing can also be beneficial to the customer because customer service is increased because call centers that are based overseas makes it possible for people to get customer support at different times because of the different time zones. Customers being able to be assisted at all times will increase their customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction will increase the company’s growth because the more satisfied customers, the more sales and growth. In our global market, multi-national companies can outsource to several nations to ensure that there will be global expertise in all areas.

There are also disadvantages to outsourcing that need to be considered. Some people argue that outsourcing is not as cheap as it seems and it may be not as pleasing to the customers as assumed by many people.

One of the disadvantages of outsourcing that is often overlooked is the effect that outsourcing has on internal employees. Outsourcing may cause employees to believe that they are not qualified enough to perform certain task and this may let them lose confidence in their work and therefore lower their quality of work. Another issue that is often not considered by companies is the number of people that work internally that will lose their jobs. Even though companies are interested