Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
What makes an outsourcing relationship work? A perfectly executed contract is NOT the answer. An outsourcing arrangement is a long-term relationship whose expectationss and attitudes must be realistic. Here’s how to do it right.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Dow Chemical Co. had underinvested in its call center. It needed to upgrade the technology, reduce its capital investment and add best practices. Who ya gonna call? EDS.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
A number of international visitors have gone to Australia to observe the unique management approach that has produced can-do attitudes in the midst of challenges in this unusually successful relationship.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Buyers are often in a hurry to outsource so they can implement their competitive strategies. But cutting short the supplier selection process can result in a failed outsourcing relationship. Here’s how to do it right.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Buyer Beware: Nine Ways to Protect Your Interests – Outsourcing experts have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Here are nine rules of the road to increase the odds of outsourcing success.
Dr. Wendell Jones
This article summarizes some of the key considerations in the next phase. The goals of this phase are to develop a detailed analysis so you can determine the current costs for the function you are planning to outsource, analyze the risks, and prepare an RFP.
Dr. Wendell Jones
An outsourcing evaluation should follow a disciplined, managerial approach from planning through negotiation and implementation, to ongoing management of the relationship.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Building for Future Competition and Growth Dramatic technological changes now regularly unsettle our ways of doing business, and this trend promises to wreak even more havoc in the future as technological advances occur even more quickly. Future organizational success already depends on strategies to make companies more agile in their ability to change so that their competitors don’t pass them by. Where will your company be five years from now? Successful companies will have evolved to operate in fresh new, more effective ways. Motivational speaker and author, John L. Mason, advises people that if the shoe fits, they shouldn’t wear it, for they are not allowing room for growth. Companies that don’t change but continue to operate as they do today will become eccentric, for growth and success require change. To stay in the game, executives must decide to stop doing things the way they have always been done, realizing that organizations have limitations and can’t be good at everything. To
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Service level agreements (SLA) are crucial to ASP buyers. SLAs create structure for the relationship and help both parties measure performance. But how do you write an SLA? How do you monitor them? Who is responsible for managing the SLAs?
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
The fourth largest steel company in the U.S., National Steel manufactures steel for the automotive, construction and tin container industries and has annual shipments of almost six million tons of flat rolled products. The company outsourced the housing and operation of its mainframe and data center services to IBM in November 1998 with a seven-year contract worth nearly $60 million. John Davis, CIO of National Steel, explains that they wanted to reallocate its human resources to solve National Steel problems, rather than technology problems. I wanted them working on solutions that would differentiate National Steel from other steel competitors, he says. The company has accomplished that and other goals, and their agreement has yielded far more than they asked for. But, after all, National Steel is no novice to outsourcing. In the 1980s, National Steel spun off its data center (which then became a part of ACS).
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