If truth be told, outsourcing became a hit in the global mainstream business enterprise due to the surge of the IT and software industry in the past few years primarily in the Third World countries. Moreover, a lot of different types of companies nowadays use outsourcing services as a means to develop their business. While there are many advantages to this practice, there are disadvantages of outsourcing as well.
In spite of the many benefits and advantages of outsourcing, disadvantages of outsourcing also abound. Just as outsourcing may prove to be beneficial to companies, the management of a company should weigh the advantages as well as the disadvantages of outsourcing before actually opting for the process.
Actually, the disadvantages of outsourcing give organizations an opportunity to think about what they are stepping into. Thus, it’s important that before the companies get to decide on outsourcing their company’s business processes, they must first keep in mind the disadvantages of outsourcing:
One of the biggest disadvantages of outsourcing is undesirable results. This is especially true when a company hires a third-party vendor to mass produce a product. In the event that the finished products do not meet quality standards, the manufacturing process must be repeated by a different vendor.
Furthermore, in outsourcing, there’s less managerial control. And so it may be harder to manage the outsourcing service provider as compared to managing your own employees. What’s more, outsourcing may be more costly too. In fact, it is sometimes much cheaper to keep a process in-house than to outsource.
Also, one of the major problems in outsourcing is that when the outsourcing company goes out of business. In other words, when your outsourcing service provider goes bankrupt or out of business, your company will have to quickly transition to a new service provider or take the process back in-house.
Moreover, in outsourcing, security and confidentiality issues are the most important. Hence, if your company is outsourcing business processes such as payroll, confidential information such as salary, all of these will be known to the outsourcing service provider. Therefore, make sure to pay special attention to the kinds of information that you grant them access to.
When you come right down to it, drawbacks are really inevitable especially to the thriving industry like Outsourcing. That is why companies should be more extra cautious with regard to their privacy, security and most importantly, financial issues while dealing with an outsourcing service provider.
Ultimately, overcoming these drawbacks will rely on identifying the right business processes for outsourcing, finding the best outsourcing provider, and setting up a good structure for your offshore operation.
