Sourcing Questions

Situation

  1. Is outsourcing seen as a supply chain opportunity to delegate or dump costs?
  2. Is outsourcing an integral part of your organisation's success?
  3. Has outsourcing delivered cost savings and efficiences to your organisation?
  4. Has outsourcing helped your organisation control costs and maintain profitability?
  5. Has your organisation used outsourcing to enhance any of its business processes?
  6. Has outsourcing transformed your organisation's business in any way?

Problems

  1. Are the high expectations of outsourcing increasingly hard to achieve?
  2. Is integrating and managing a portfolio of service providers becoming more difficult?
  3. Have you seen service disruption due to problems at the boundaries between services sourced from different providers?
  4. Are your competitors using outsourcing and reaping the same advantages?
  5. Is your organisation fooled by any of the following myths:
    • Sourcing independence.
    • Service autonomy
    • Economies of scale
    • Self-management
    • Providers are the enemy
    • Sourcing is procurement
    • Steady state
    • Sourcing competency

Needs

Will your organisation, either imminently or the medium term:
  1. Look at sourcing as a chance to use partnerships to augment skills, to scale a fast growing business, or to provide capabilities for competitive advantage?
  2. Assess what functions and services it should build and provide for itself, versus what it should seek from the outside world?
  3. Identify the desired business outcomes for its sourcing strategy?
  4. Create contracts, relationships, measurements and governance that support and enable its desirted strategic sourcing outcomes?
  5. Establish and maintain a disciplined provisioning and blending of services from the optimal set of internal and external providers in the pursuit of business goals?