Collaborative Outsourcing

Since the days in which the Ford Motor company owned its own coal mines to fuel the smelting of the steel for the Model T, there has been a steady trend away from vertical integration toward a gradual decoupling of core and non-core business activities. That trend, represented today by the explosion of off-shore outsourcing, has come to a cross-road in the early years of the 21st century. Is there, as some business and social critics insist, a line separating what can be outsourced from other activities that must be carried out by traditional company employees?

PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) research strongly indicates that businesses today are actually asking a profoundly different but equally revealing question. That question is not whether many corporate functions should be outsourced, but how? In answering this question, successful outsourcers and outsourcing providers working together have invented new models that have transformed the nature of outsourcing itself. This dynamic emerges specifically from new forms of customer and service provider relationships, according to PwC's latest Global Outsourcing study, which asked nearly 300 executives around the world about their outsourcing experiences and expectations.

What immediately becomes clear from their comments is that, like news of Mark Twain's death, the end of outsourcing has been greatly exaggerated (1). A large majority of outsourcers (87 percent) say today's outsourcing delivers the benefits projected in their original business plans and that 91 percent of this same group feel that outsourcing is a core tool in their operational toolkit and they would outsource again, whether or not they have had entirely happy experiences in outsourcing themselves.

What is changing is the range of approaches that companies from a variety of industries are taking to the outsourcing paradigm. Traditional single-source outsourcing contracts are highly focused on fixed-price negotiation and delivery of "commodity" services such as IT infrastructures services, and this type of outsourcing is not going to disappear. Indeed, 39 percent of the survey population expects to increase their use of this model for outsourcing.

At the same time, as companies explore newer areas for outsourcing such as procurement systems, finance and research and development, they are discovering that other models promise to deliver more value. Fifty percent of the executives polled say that they expect to increase multi-sourcing arrangements, and 45 percent plan to increase their use of joint ventures. What binds together all of the newer approaches to outsourcing, it transpires, is a different kind of relationship between customer and supplier. In a nutshell, those companies that describe themselves as having highly successful outsourcing arrangements are also those most convinced that collaboration rather than a conventional arms length customer/vendor agreement is the key. Deeper collaboration, according to the respondents, is based on honest and transparent business relationships, joint decision-making on matters of mutual interest, joint governance structures, and shared risks and rewards.