The Outsourcing Conundrum: A Path to Navigate the Inside-Outsourcing Labyrinth

For the past few decades, companies have turned more and more to outsourcing non-core activities in order to establish a competitive advantage. A growing trend in outsourcing is inside-outsourcing, where a supplier performs services inside a customer s physical location, working side by side with the customer s workforce. Many services fall into the inside-outsourcing category, such as groundskeeping, cleaning, light maintenance, logistics, small production support, IT, and administration. The proximity between the customer s workforce and the service provider adds a level of complexity to successful service delivery. As the trend towards outsourcing continues and particularly as inside-outsourcing grows both those who supply and those who buy desperately need to align on the larger, strategic business reasons and purpose for why a service is being outsourced. A company s ability to choose the right partners to outsource to, partners who have a tried and true model to navigate, has never been more important. The Outsourcing Conundrum provides an inside-outsourcing service provider (IOSP) with that model, a step-by-step path, to align the provision of services to a customer s purpose for outsourcing, and thus gain true, lasting competitive advantage by building strong partnerships with their customers.