The term comes from the English phrase “outer-source-using”, which means “the use of resources attracted from the outside.” In Russia and the CIS countries, outsourcing should be understood as involving any third-party companies in solving a certain task.
For example, many corporations use the services:
- ordering food to the office;
- cleaning;
- protection of facilities;
- transportation of something;
- carrying out repairs, etc.
Small companies most often outsource any legal and accounting tasks, order maintenance of the IT infrastructure, etc. The main parameter of cooperation within the framework of outsourcing is the transfer of non-core functions to another company.
Managed IT Services
What is outsourcing for?
Third-party companies are most often involved in such situations:
- The company is small and it is financially unprofitable for its management to form a separate division to service a certain system.
- The company is large, has many narrow-profile divisions that do not make a profit, which is bad for statistics. Management decides to outsource some processes.
- The company is financially unable to spend money on non-core work, is uncompetitive in certain specialties and cannot find the right specialists.
- The company needs to reduce the cost of paying staff, or it is simply reducing the number of employees.
Types of outsourcing
You can outsource the solution to literally any task. Let’s look at the most popular types of outsourcing:
- IT. In small companies, it is rare to see large staffs of professional programmers and more often people with a minimum set of knowledge in this field are hired. And when a more serious task needs to be solved, it is outsourced.
- Accounting services. Just as in the previous case, it is not profitable for all small firms to keep a staff of accountants. It’s not enough just to hire employees, you also need to buy special software, configure it, etc. The way out of the situation is accounting outsourcing.
- Legal services. Almost all companies resort to legal outsourcing, regardless of their scale and profile. After all, it is impossible to find a professional lawyer who is equally well versed in all types of jurisprudence.
- HR outsourcing. Usually, secretaries, lawyers and accountants work with personnel in enterprises. The level of distribution of responsibilities with this approach leaves much to be desired in 99% of cases. Outsourcing of personnel solves this problem.
- Outsourcing of sales. Professional sales managers are appreciated everywhere. Company executives are willing to pay them good money, but the main difficulty is finding such a specialist. And in narrow-profile companies that provide outsourcing services in this niche, there are such experts.