How and Where to Fit Offshore Support Into Your Business

offshoreWe recently talked about why a company would use offshore support. Many businesses turn to outsourced support providers to drive profitability, enable growth, and add to flexibility. Outsourcing work – whether it’s recruiting work or administrative functions – to a staffing company supplier can solve a number of business problems, while also saving money and making an impact on your bottom line.

Once you’ve made the decision to utilize offshore support, it’s critical to think through what part of your business will be supported. I recommend by starting with this checklist. If you can answer ‘yes’ to the following questions for a particular part of your business, that area is likely a great candidate for outsourced support.

Does the role exist today? It is much easier to outsource support on roles that exist today, as opposed to tasks that are currently embedded within broader roles. If the role doesn’t exist today you’ll have a difficult time setting goals, providing guidance, etc.

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Do you have multiple people performing the same function? Typically the effort to migrate a process to an outsourced service provider is worthwhile if there are five or more people performing the process.  Ideally there would be 10 or more people working on the same or similar process.  This makes moving the function beneficial in terms of cost and process effectiveness.

Do you have a well-defined process for performing the work? It’s important that processes be well documented before transferring the work to an outsourcer (including training, metrics, etc.).  A process that is learned through “tribal knowledge” is less effective. Your new outsourced team will need clearly defined processes and steps to learn quickly and perform to standard with a short learning curve.

Can the work be performed remotely? While most processes are digitized today, if a role requires someone to be onsite, an outsourced provider can’t likely help. If you can perform the work at an office across town, an outsourced team should be a fit.

MORE: Offshore Recruitment: The Often-Missed No-Brainer

 

Brian Cotter

Brian Cotter
Brian Cotter is president and co-founder of PSG Global Solutions. He can be reached at bcotter (at) psgglobal (dot) com.

Brian Cotter

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