Conventional versus Unconventional Outsourcing

Abstract

Today’s world is becoming very competitive and companies are going the extra miles and revisiting their strategies to keep up and sustain competitive advantage. Companies are striving towards low cost, high-quality products delivering value to customers therefore a need to focus on core competencies is essential to create that value and minimize overheads. Capitalizing on know-how, brand equity management, customer and partner relationship management, today’s companies drive for building long-term strategic ventures with selected partners in key markets. Companies are realizing the importance of adding value, reducing cost while delivering products to customers smoothly and efficiently therefore gaining market penetration, market development and product development which result in more market shares at minimum cost, better global presence, brand ownership in case of distributor partnership allocation. This study focuses on the many ways of conventional and unconventional outsourcing, to gain competitive advantage while pointing out where outsourcing can be of failure to some companies lacking strategic management. It also shows the importance of intelligent versus traditional outsourcing where factors such as cutting cost, streamlining the operations and creating partnerships have to be more revolving and consider more convergent and divergent thinking adding for instance innovation to cutting cost, or streamlining the value chain as a whole or adding trust based partnership not just an arm length.