Have You Considered Outsourcing?
What you should know about outsourcing.Total Quality Management (TQM) is a selection of tools and techniques used in businesses to control quality and reduce costs and waste. It promotes a climate of change, and collaboration between managers, employees, suppliers & customers to improve the quality of the goods and services you are offering. Implementing an effective TQM system is an organisation-wide effort to infuse quality into every activity. Although it’s not always considered part of TQM, an organisation can drastically improve quality through outsourcing.
Outsourcing: The contracting out of an organisation’s in-house function to a preferred vendor with a high-quality level in the task area.
Outsourcing is one of the fastest-growing trends in business, with companies seeing immediate monetary savings as well as improvement of quality. By contracting out activities in which companies do not have speciality skills in such as HR, design and marketing or bookkeeping, organisations can save on costs relating to hiring specialists or training staff, as well as freeing up the time of their current staff members so they can focus their attention on their core duties.
Through the vendor selection process, organisations have access to many high-calibre skill pools that wouldn’t necessarily be available for hiring in-house. The opportunity to work with companies that have such high and refined skill set is only going to increase your organisations overall quality and efficiency, leaving you to focus on your core business processes.
I used to manage the advertising myself, we were doing a great job, were generating lots of leads, everything was good, but I got too busy and I needed to hand it off, now I’m a control freak, I’m very fussy about who I let manage our companies account, we engaged James from Digital Simple and he’s done an absolutely amazing job.”
– Matthew Horncastle, Williams Corporation
Scared of relinquishing control?
Outsourcing can seem daunting, but it does not eliminate the need for control. Instead, Managers need to identify how they will ensure that the quality of the outsourced function is acceptable and to do that by carefully seeking and selecting the operations that can be accomplished with higher quality elsewhere and finding the best partners for the task. The manager then remains in control of maintaining good relationships and communications with their chosen partner as well as control of regular reporting on the outsourced activities and associated costs.
