Offshoring and outsourcing to developing countries

Introduction

Offshoring refers to the achievement of intermediary inputs by companies or governments from locations outside the consuming country.

Many of attentions has been focused on the risk that offshoring of services might have through the way of job movement to countries, such as India, where organizations can pay skilled workers much less than in their home countries. In general, this argument has focused on the negative effects of offshoring. However, offshoring has some benefits and is likely to bring these benefits to urban economies through lower costs of services, restructuring and increased interest.

Increase in employment in different services implies for these urban countries such as Australia, will not only have the benefits of increase in imports but also has an increase in exports and therefore Australia will benefited as a larger market where domestic firms can offer their services.

Purpose of the Report

The offshoring of service sector jobs is likely to be an issue of growing concern in Australia and most other developed countries such as USA. For private companies and government agencies it acts the same, there will be a lot of opportunities to benefit from a cheap and increasingly educated workforce in the developing world. Technological advances will continue to ease these opportunities.

This research has focused on the first important effect of offshoring which is the loss of jobs happening of the offshoring. It is important to be aware of, but, that increased efficiency from shedding labour could guide to higher manufacture and a growth of employment in other lines of work.

In particular, this paper introduces some public procedure issues for both business and governments to think as they manage the effects of offshoring.

Methodology

In my work I used clear, 6-step methodology that has been involved to gather, process and analysis the data.

Step1. Offshore Definition

This part is taken to have a general idea about what is actually means by offshoring.

Step 2. Gathering some information by looking at the different articles

The articles that I looked at helped me to get the main point of offshoring effects and benefits on the different organization in different countries.

Step 3. Onsite to Offshore Knowledge change.

The main goal for this phase is to understand the client requirements, business processes, and company standards.

Step 4. Offshore Process Definition.

Execute customization of the methodology for the client specific requirements.

Step 5. Offshore Research finishing.

Start executing the finding according to the research plan.

Step 6. Review the report and identify the weak areas of the performance.

To make sure that everything is done accurately regards the research I’ve done.

Research Finding and Analysis

One of the largest business decisions are offshoring decisions (L. Jean Camp, Seymour Goodman, Charles H. House, William B. Jack, RobRamer, Marie Stella, 2005). They are usually has a little long-term risks and social impacts. Many organization managers believes of that they would experience some of the long-term risks such as to reputations at the same time as they suppose to consider risks that directly can effect their business process.

In current years, many of the companies have increased their use of outsourcing and offshoring. These arrangements present both benefits and risks to the organizations using them.

Deloitte (2008) stated that offshoring can take place in two forms one is when the companies moving part or whole of their operations overseas or using a greater share of imported materials in home manufactures. Both are seen as a major means of achieving cost reductions which is end up with a benefit. Offshoring benefits may also be included lower labor or operating costs (Deloitte, 2008, p.1). Furthermore, the particular benefits from offshoring will vary from company to company that so many companies see offshoring as significant for future profits, even with their initially poor savings. (Kirkegaard, cited in working paper, 2005, p.11)

On the other hand offshoring contains some risks as well. The risks come in three categories. There are risks for companies that engage in offshoring. There are risks to individuals who are often helpless victims of the kinds of such organization process and finally, there are risks to the economic of nations.

Procuring companies are primarily focused on obtaining the financial benefits of offshoring; most appear to be inexperienced about the risks, or they do not have the time or resources to care. (Kirkegaard, 2005, p.9)

To illustrate the benefits and risks of the offshoring in long-term and short term lets have a look at the two pacific brands example which is Berlei and Hard Yakka.

Much of Pacific Brand’s manufacture is carried out to China (Weller, 2007). That will reduce times and enable stock to be delivered directly to customers but most of the jobs lost will be relocated to cheap labor economies like Asia. The company will close down the best part of its clothing manufacturing services across the world and in its place rely on sourcing products from other suppliers (Sydney Morning Herald, 2009)

Offshoring pacific brands from an organization itself have some winners and loser. It can show its risks and benefits in short or long-term for these two groups.

The winners of offshoring process are:

ï‚· That company which is engaging in offshoring and offshore outsourcing.

The resultant of this is shown by the large cost saving, usually begin from the lower labor costs. Savings can be different from business to business and country to country, but most business skilled estimated range between 30 and 60 percent (Kirkegaard, 2005). In the longer term, these companies will also gain contact to highly skilled labor, by two ways. First is directly through their own offshored services and second is indirectly through offshore outsourcing from local suppliers. Also, offshore locations generally will allow a more flexible management of their employee’s levels. Offshoring and offshore outsourcing engage a large capital stock in a low wages labor setting as a resulting of this relationship, the usual close relationship between salary and output is loosen in the short and medium terms. So, a company that engages in offshoring and offshore outsourcing will have a good increase of the significant output improvements.

ï‚· Country which exchange the production and services.

As Australia is the supplying country of this pacific brands so it’s benefits are basic: the short term benefits are in terms of being a job generated and to be an investment attracted country, and those of the longer term are in terms of the skill transfers to local populations that come with offshore decisions by companies.

ï‚· Consumers of offshored production and services.

Consumers – which is included the individuals, not just companies – of offshored services will benefit from lower prices of the items they use. Also they may benefit from the business hours increasing in many services industries. Price declines will, depending on the level of offshoring and offshore outsourcing and it is relative to the total, make price rises lower and therefore show the way to higher real income. (Kirkegaard, 2005, p.13) mentioned that “This serves furthermore as a “redistributive tool” between company profits and consumer benefits of the total “welfare gain” from offshoring and offshore outsourcing”.

The offshoring processes also have some groups known as the losers of the benefits.

ï‚· This groups are included the workers who lose their jobs because of offshoring.

Workers who lose their jobs as a result of offshoring and offshore outsourcing are the direct losers. It is very significant to appreciate that those who lose their jobs are a small and concentrated group, relative to the much more numerous and special group of winners from offshoring, who will all benefit only fairly little individually.

This irregularity between winners and losers makes the political wealth market of offshoring and outsourcing equal to most other discussions of free deal and bring in competition (Lewis and Richardson 2001).

According to parliament of Australia (2004-2005) one of the important reasons to offshore clerical works and high-paying qualified positions is the development of communications technologies over the past decade has provided opportunities for companies.

After discussing the winner and looser group of offshoring and offshore outsourcing process, in particle there are numerous benefits and risks that engage in offshoring.

Main benefits that a business can get through the offshoring are:

Accessing to talent: For certain job positions there is a greater availability of highly skilled and experienced employees overseas.

it can be highly cost savings

Quickly can fill the open positions – it can take a month or more to fill certain positions in some countries like USA (Green, 2007). However, given the accessibility of offshore employees, open positions can usually be filled more quickly.

Time savings – By using an offshore employee, you reduce the time you would normally spend on interviewing, orientation and managing employee motivation.

Flexibility – offshoring allowing companies to quickly develop and contract their overseas staff in accorded with business needs.

While there many identifiable benefits of offshoring, it does not come without its risks and challenges, as well. The more important risks that can address for that are:

Cultural issues – Different cultures have its own communication styles, different attitudes toward argument resolution and also they have their different ways of getting work done.

Loss of worker jobs – Offshore outsourcing is a politically charged issue. Most economists believe that offshoring is good for the economy and in the end results in additional jobs (Green, 2007). The theory is that the lower level jobs get outsourced and the country that involved in offshoring will end up doing higher value work. Even assuming the economists’ view is correct; having their jobs displaced is painful to those workers impacted. It might take a lot of time to retrain and/or land one of these “higher value” jobs (Green, 2007).

Quality of service – If not being more careful during the process, cost savings can be more than offset by service issues. Going through analysis of the function being studied for outstanding could help to defend your trade and corporation against the services losses. It is also important to make sure that the role is appropriate for the particular country where you are outsourcing. Finally, before moving any role and function overseas a careful performs should carry out on the offshore vendor.

After all, one way of reducing the risks can be done by the government (Windisch, 2009). The government could move to make Pacific Brands nationalize. And this is the only way that the jobs could be saved.

If the government won’t act to save jobs, then the union group should build a movement which must be strong enough to give the government no choice but to act (Windisch, 2009).

In addition, understanding and dealing with cultural and language issues will ease the outsourcing and offshoring process (Knowledge @ Emory, 2008).

Recommendations:

Recommendations will help to concern the manufacture of better cost performance, improvements to measuring services employment, and other data needed to document any impacts of trade on the employment and income of the workers.

There are many improvement achievements that could be done to improve the data on services which will need to be theatrically argued if our understanding of services offshoring and its effects is to improve.

The three main recommendations are as follows:

1) The companies that involved in the offshoring process should collect more detail on services products that are traded internationally. Without a more detailed view of which services are traded internationally, it will remain impossible to agree on which parts of job experience has more pressure from import competition. As a result, with any accuracy we will be unable to know where in the economy to look for the effects of services offshoring.

2) Also they have to collect more detail on domestic trade in services. These detailed will help to give a better view of the role that services play in the economy of the country.

3) Having enough data on service by employment is necessary to make a decision on the employment and income effects of services offshoring because service work plays an important role in all industries.

Conclusion

Offshoring is identified to be an opportunity, rather than a risk. As this working paper has presented, it will create both winners and losers through the process of offshoring, but it is known to be up to the individual governments to make sure countries realize a net gain of all the benefits.

The offshoring of jobs is likely to be an issue of growing concern in Australia and throughout the developed world. It is the same for private companies and government agencies, there will be plenty of opportunities to benefit from cheap educated workers in the developing world. The only thing that keeps on making these opportunities easier is the technological advances development.

It is right to assume that cheap labour costs will attract many more Australian overseas and it is also correct that governments will face more pressure to promote inner investment and allow workers to retrain and move into other fields, but, offshoring companies and offshore providers will also be challenged. Australia currently has highly skilled employees and a sound regulatory environment. These attractions may be more important than the savings from using cheap overseas labour, mainly if the quality and reliability of the offshore service is lacking.

Finally, Australia needs to put its people over its land and focus on providing skills to people in stagnating regions, rather than build extra new places in the foreign country.