Category Archives: Outsourcing

You’re Understaffed. And You’re Not Alone. Now What? Part I

First things first. The findings of a recent Source One Management Services survey (summarized in Part I of a 4-part series on how Companies Face Limited Procurement Resources, available on their website) indicate that 1 of 3 Procurement departments is understaffed. Ouch! With costs climbing and GDP growth (and, thus, consumer spending) flattening, this is not a good thing. For many companies, their only option for growth is cost control and value generation through Supply Management. (Note that we are claiming cost control and not cost savings because, now that inflation is back with a vengeance, with hyper-inflation lurking around the corner, there is no such thing as cost savings, just cost control.)

So what does this mean?

  1. You’re not doing enough analysis.
    Analysis takes time. More time than just dumping your AP and P-Card databases into a spend analysis tool and running the canned top-n spend reports by supplier, category, department, etc. As per our recent post on Spend Analysis – How Do You Get It Right, real savings comes from real insight which requires real analysis, which takes time, effort, and focus.
  2. You’re not sourcing enough categories.
    If you’re short-staffed, you’re going to focus on the top n suppliers, categories, departments, etc. spit out by the canned reports from your spend analysis reporting tool. Some of these will have opportunities, but since you’ll already know most of these opportunities, you’ll miss many of your biggest opportunities, which are typically found in the high-opportunity tier-2 categories that never get addressed due to lack of resources.
  3. You’re not finding new sources of value.
    The future of Supply Management, in an inflationary economy, is value-generation. Cost control is a good start, and in an organization overspending by 5% to 15%, it will make a big impact in the beginning. But once all of the fat is trimmed, the best you can do is reign in costs. This means that the next round of savings is going to come from identifying value-generation opportunities. Bundling and unbundling the right value added services for your organization; helping engineering identify more cost-effective alternate materials and production processes that are also more environmentally friendly, and may let you charge a sustainability premium; and identifying new market opportunities based on products and services your strategic suppliers could provide you with can all bring value to your organization.

Now what? We’ll address that in Part II.

Sole Sourcing In Your Supply Chain: Oversight Or …

An indicator of fraud?

As per a number of Sourcing Innovation posts, and a recent post over on Procurement Leaders on “Procurement Fraud: A Shocking Wake-Up Call”, procurement is a ripe area for occupational fraud. Outside of Accounts Payable, Procurement generally controls or influences the most organizational spend.

And not only is “Procurement Related Fraud on the Rise” (Spend Matters UK), but it is taking place at 2 out of every 3 organizations — many of which are even unaware of its presence! Furthermore, every organization affected by fraud is likely losing 2% of its revenues to fraud. Forget overpayments, duplicate payments, and other recovery audit targets that, even when extremely successful, aren’t likely to recover more than 0.5% of your revenue in supplier credits — especially when most of these overpayments can be prevented with good invoice automation. Fraud is the bigger uncontrolled drain on the average organization’s coffers, and the issue that most needs to be attacked.

Fortunately, there are tell-tale signs of fraud, and if you regularly look for, investigate, and take precautions to prevent certain scenarios, the chances of fraud occurring in your organization will be significantly reduced. A number of these signs are succinctly summarized in Mr. Ashcroft’s post on Procurement Fraud: A Shocking Wake-Up Call, referenced above, but it’s the first four that really catch your attention.

  1. Single Source Decisions
  2. Insistence on Sole Contact With Suppliers
  3. Reluctance to Change Suppliers
  4. Refusal to Issue Invitations to Tender

All of these relate to sole-sourcing, which we all know to be a significant supply chain risk as a single disruption can wipe out an entire product line or category. Sole-sourcing should generally only be used when you are producing a new product which involves turning over a lot of proprietary knowledge to the manufacturer, proprietary knowledge upon which your competitiveness is dependent, or when the product requires a new type of technique that only one supplier can currently offer at an affordable price point. Otherwise, for supply assurance and risk mitigation, dual (or tri) supply should be used.

If something is being sole-sourced for which there is no good justification, then the sole-source arrangement should be carefully evaluated as the reason therefore could be fraudulent (or, if not fraudulent, unethical, as the buyer could be choosing that supplier simply because the supplier constantly gives the buyer free tickets to sporting events, free trips to industry conferences, etc.). And if any suggestions to change the supplier meet with unnecessary reluctance or insistence not too, that’s an even bigger indicator that something could be happening under the table.

In other words, when you get right down to it, sole-sourcing is generally not a good decision. When you combine the opportunities it presents for fraud and disruption, the risk is typically too great.

When Outsourcing for Onsite Service, It’s Very Important To Remember …

… to check Employment and Visa Status as well as Nationality of any worker who will be working on your site. The last thing you want is for the IT contractor in the middle of an upgrade to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System, or the highly trained system engineer with the rare skill required to fix your production line, to be deported in the middle of the project!

Due to the low limit on H-1B Visas from the American protectionists, it is a strong possibility that it could happen, as SI really doubts that Infosys was the only outsourcer to abuse the system and illegally bring workers in on B-1 visas to work on client IT projects. (On October 30, Indian tech giant Infosys agreed to a $34 Million civil settlement with US authorities to “resolve all allegations” and end visa-fraud investigations and have the serious criminal charges that could be brought against the company dropped after federal prosecutors in Texas found it had committed “systemic visa fraud and abuse”. As per this detailed article over on First Post, Infosys agreed to the settlement after prosecutors, as a result of a two-year investigation, unveiled its accusations that Infosys “knowingly and unlawfully” brought Engineers into the US on B-1 visitors for onsite client projects that actually required H-1B visas.)

So when you are outsourcing your projects, if you want to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, demand to know the following with respect to any contractor who will be working on site:

  • Full Legal Name
  • Nationalities
  • Unique Government Identifier for at least one Nationality
    such as Passport ID, Drivers License ID, etc.
  • Current Legal Status in the Country where the work will be performed
  • If the legal status is not citizen, proof of legal status (to work)

And if any of this information is not provider to you, with sufficient time for you to verify such, before the contractor is brought on site, deny the contractor access to your site. Maybe you’ll have to wait a few extra days, or pay a little more, but you won’t have to worry about being an accomplice to illegal activity or losing a critical resource at the worst possible time in the middle of a project.

Building and Ground Maintenance Outsourcing: A Maturing Cost Reduction Trend That Requires a Disciplined Approach


Today’s post is from Howard Gutman, a Manager in the Hackett Group’s Strategy and Operations Practice who consults to Fortune 1000 clients in operations improvement, sourcing and procurement, supply chain, and cost optimization. He was previously associated with MMG, KPMG, and PWC PRTM.

Many companies currently have their building and ground maintenance function (e.g. security, janitorial, and HVAC) managed by their own employees and/or a set of local suppliers for individual offices/ manufacturing sites. However, the success of companies such as AT&T and BMW, who have outsourced their building and ground maintenance function to integrated facilities management firms such as Jones Lang LaSalle and ABM, has caused many companies to question whether they should change their approach to the building and ground maintenance (BGM) function. Based on our recent client work, the outsourcing of BGM is an increasingly maturing trend across several industries but it requires a disciplined approach to develop an understanding of a company’s current demand and specifications in order to maximize the overall savings opportunity.

Before a company can consider outsourcing this function, a company should utilize a disciplined approach to understand demand for BGM by collecting the following information:

  1. Number of building sites;
  2. Basic information about each site (e.g., address information, total square footage, building population, number of bathrooms, outdoor square footage);
  3. Total spend for each major building and ground maintenance category by site (e.g. janitorial, HVAC, and environmental services).

Once this basic understanding of a company’s demand is established, a company must work with their operational leads to gather detailed specifications for each of their BGM services (e.g., frequency and requirement for HVAC maintenance at each site). After the development of the demand set and specifications, a company can pursue a strategy of outsourcing this function as the information mentioned above is essential for any RFP process involving integrated facilities management companies.

Two recent clients utilized the above approach to outsource their BGM function but each had initial concerns about outsourcing this function due to business culture and regulatory reasons.

Our first client, a Fortune 500 telecommunications company, liked the operational benefits of moving to a single integrated building provider, which includes centralized reporting and 24-7 support. However, they had concerns about regulatory issues such as maintaining continuous 911 service at rural locations. Through the RFP process, our client discovered that all of its major competitors had moved to an outsourced BGM solution, particularly at their rural locations.

Our second client, in the manufacturing space, had concerns about moving control of building management from their plant managers to an outside building and ground maintenance provider. Through the RFP process, it discovered that many of its competitors had moved to integrated facilities management companies who were deeply experienced in the manufacturing space.

The results of these two projects are projected to result in cost savings of 10% to 12.5% over the next two years along with increased maintenance standards and visibility into building issues through 24/7 online reporting. However, the main benefit for these organizations was that they could better focus on their core business functions, while delivering continuous savings through a disciplined approach for outsourcing BGM that has already been implemented by their peers.

Thanks, Howard for some insight into this often overlooked spend category!

Even China Knows that You Should Home (Market) Source!

SI has been telling you since 2007 that you should be Home Sourcing. SI has outlined the Advantages of Home Country Sourcing, shared a great post on Home-Shoring from the Manufacturing Innovation Blog, and given you another reason to source close to home. But have you listened? For the most part, no.

But you should, or this is another area where China is going to eat your lunch too. As per this recent article over on the Washington Post that asked if U.S. Manufacturing [is] Making a Comeback, a Chinese company has just set up a factory in the United States!

This January, Lenovo (which acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005), a Beijing-based computer maker, opened a new manufacturing line in Whitsett, N.C. to handle assembly of PCs, tablets, workstations, and servers. Why? According to Jay Parker, President for North America, it needs the flexibility to assemble units for speedy delivery. But, more importantly, the math adds up. Chinese wages are on the rise, the risk of loss to piracy (at sea) is increasing every year, and we have reached the point where the higher North American labour costs can be offset by savings on logistics. And Chinese companies know logistics costs as good as anyone. (As per Sunday’s post on China Packaged Goods, with a [major] stake in 16 global ports, thousands of shipping lanes, and a fifth of the world’s container fleet, China pretty much sets the prices for Ocean shipping these days.) A barrel of crude oil that was $27 in 1993 and $35 in 2003 is now $88 in 2013, inflation adjusted. That’s over a 3X increase since the early stages of the outsourcing craze. And China wages have increased so much in China over the last decade that a new study just found that labour costs are now 20% lower in Mexico. (Source: SCDigest) Plus, the wage gap between China and North America is expected to shrink to a mere $7 per hour by 2015! When you factor in logistics costs and loss due to theft, IP theft, and (ocean) piracy, that’s nothing! (Especially when the US is on pace to have lower manufacturing costs than Europe and Japan by 2015! There’s a reason Nissan, Honda, and Toyota are exporting from the US. That’s right, exporting from, not importing into.)

When you add it all up, and consider the production efficiencies that come from our ability to constantly innovate better processes, it just makes sense to bring (last stage) manufacturing back to North America. (Especially when the productivity of North American workers keeps rising.) Maybe you still outsource key components, but you certainly don’t outsource washing machine production, for example. The last thing you do is ship empty space or dead-weight.