Whether you’re preparing your checklist for building an offshore company or getting a better understanding of the labor industry, the ever-changing business landscape has made it necessary for businesses to distribute work better.
Nowadays, two main approaches exist—insourcing and outsourcing. While both are viable options for running a business, factors like cost, flexibility, and skills expertise can play a part in determining which approach is best suited for your needs.
What Is Insourcing? How Is It Different ThanOutsourcing?
The main difference between in- and outsourcing is where the labor is coming from. Insourcing refers to the management of a project by the company’s own employees or departmental units. Meanwhile, outsourcing refers to the practice of obtaining goods and services from an external supplier.
Insourcing is commonly used in supply chain management, quality control, and sales, while outsourcing is commonly used in manufacturing, IT services, customer service, marketing, and finance.
Both work towards improving business competitiveness, acquiring necessary labor or skills, and maximizing a company’s resources. Outsourcing can be broken down into three types: offshoring, nearshoring, and onshoring.
Offshoring is when vendors are located in another country, allowing the company to enjoy round-the-clock operations. Nearshoring relegates these functions to nearby countries, with partners sharing or having similarities in their business language of choice. Finally, onshoring is when processes are relocated to a different location in the same country to keep operational costs low.
What Are Their Benefits and Drawbacks?
The advantages of outsourcing are that labor costs can remain low, allowing a company to remain dynamic through access to talent with specialized skills, multiple outsourcing partnerships, and the freedom to focus more on core business aspects.
Outsourcing also has its downsides. It does not give a company control over talent management, as the partner-provider will have their own method of management. Company and customer information may also be accessed by a third party, which can compromise trade secrets and other sensitive data.
Finally, communication and cultural barriers may affect the quality of output or service delivered, as well as efforts to coordinate between the company and its partner provider.
Insourcing’s main strengths are its proximity to the brand and its products, as well as the amount of control the company can exercise over execution and implementation. It also ensures that employees are working with the same work standards and company culture.
Its primary disadvantage is the burden it places on the company’s resources itself to hire and train employees to achieve the level of expertise needed for the job. It also means that the company needs to divide its attention between multiple business functions, some of which do not directly contribute to its core functions.
Deciding whether outsourcing or insourcing is a better fit for a company’s needs is dependent on a number of factors: a company’s priorities (from having tight managerial control to reducing overhead costs), the flexibility of the organizational setup, the type of project that requires labor, the immediacy of the project, and the company’s long-term plans for the business.
While using outsourcing services similar to Shadow IT will allow businesses to have access to products or services that it does not have the resources or capabilities to manage in house, insourcing offers a more consistent and controlled output.
Depending on the nature of the business, transitioning from one type of labor to another may be necessary for overall growth. It is also possible to develop a hybrid model of work distribution that uses both in-house and outsourced talent.
At the end of the day, both insourcing and outsourcing have their places in the bigger picture. Deciding which approach to use is the company’s prerogative, based on its needs and goals.
Insourcing vs. Outsourcing: What’s the Difference?
Both insourcing and outsourcing aim to increase your competitive advantage by making sure that work is distributed properly and efficiently.
