It is easy to imagine that you can manage your own moves to outsourcing successfully. This Topic presents a number of reasons for using consultants.

Relationships

The relationships between you and your service providers can be complex. This is especially true of outsourcing. Because an outsourcer is managing parts of your business, there is a high degree of dependence on the relationship working. This dependency is heightened by the fact that you may not be able to replace an outsourcer quickly if the relationship goes wrong.

Unless you have specific expertise in relationship management, you should consider appointing a consultant who has successfuly managed the development and implementation of relationships between customers and service providers.

Benefits

During the work that you will need to do to define the processes to be outsourced, there must be a continual emphasis on the benefits that you get from the processes. Again, when you are selecting an outsourcer, this emphasis must be maintained. It must continue through your appointment of an outsourcer and beyond, so that the benefits continue to be your main focus.

An experienced outsourcing consultant will keep benefits as the main aim throughout the entire procedure. A consultant will not be side-tracked by considerations that are unrelated to you receiving benefits.

Service levels

Aligned to the last point, you will need to have service levels that are appropriate and necessary. All of the service levels must relate to the benfits that you will get from outsourcing. There must be nothing that is unnecessary or that could divert the outsourcer from doing the best possible job for you.

Experienced oustourcing consultants can prepare definitions of services, the service levels that they will need to meet, and the methods for measuring those levels, with a focus throughout on the benefits - what the service will do for you.

Impacts

There could be several impacts of working with an outsourcer, some of which are discussed in other Topics. One that is becomingly increasingly significant is the impact of improved information availability. Many outsourcers now offer sophisticated Internet-based services. This can include reporting to their customers. It can also include data entry by the customers.

If you appoint a human resources outsourcer, it is likely that it will offer you Internet-based tools to enter and retrieve information about your employees.

Users may expect the same sophistication from other applications. The outsourcer's applications and systems can appear far advanced of your remaining in-house applications and systems. This can lead to pressures either to upgrade these or to outsource them as well.

Your consultant should be able to help you manage these user expectations, as well as the other direct and indirect impacts of outsourcing.

See Quality of service

Expertise

You are most likely to be outsourcing your "non-core" activities: the ones that aren't essential to meeting your business objectives or that don't affect your competitive edge. Your core activities are the ones that form your speciality: the activities that you are particularly good at doing. It follows that you may not have a good deal of current expertise in the non-core activities that you plan to outsource. As a result, you may not know what to expect of high class services to support those non-core activities. You may not be able even to prepare these activities for outsourcing.

Your outsourcing consultant should be aware the latest developments in the area that you plan to outsource. They can then help you to appoint an outsourcer who can transform those activities so that derive the greatest benefit from them.

Impartiality

It is relatively easy to remain impartial during the selection of your first outsourcer. You will have no benchmark for comparison - and certainly not a benchmark gained from experience. You may rely, to some extent, on the competing outsourcers for guidance.

Remaining impartial during the selection of a second or third outsourcer may not be so easy. If your current outsourcer has performed well, there may be tendency to appoint them for the next activities to be outsourced. There may be other, more specialist, more experienced outsourcers for those activities. If your current outsourcer has not performed well, there may be tendency to overlook them for future activities, even though, in some instances, no other outsourcer could have performed better, given the circumstances.

Even if you do not appoint a consultant for your first outsourcing project, you should for any subsequent ones. A consultant will be aware of the capabilities of the competing outsourcers and can ensure that you make an impartial decision, based on the benefits that you will get.