A Quick Guide to Due Diligence in Outsourcing
Outsourcing and shared service teams are involved in aspects of business across diverse verticals like retail, travel, property and transport but the list goes on.
The number one reason companies choose to outsourcing is cost savings. While this is a key deciding factor when picking an outsourcing partner, Cion has extensive experience building Knowledge Workforce teams for our clients. Over the years, we realized that a pure cost savings approach to outsourcing can actually cost you more in the long run due to poor supplier performance, unstructured contracts and mismanagement of expectations around cost, skill and efficiency.
Building an outsourcing team focused on Knowledge workers, proactive problem solving and razor sharp reliability is Cion’s mission. We have seen businesseses transformed and countless jobs created by good outsourcing deals.
Here is our 2 biggest factors to consider when building an outsourced team, be it from the 52 million freelance workers online, or working with an established vendor like Cion Data.
Research your regional options
Knowing the depth and breadth of a countries talent pool, how it invests in its workforce, the rates of high school graduation is a good indicator of how quickly you can create a pro-active, problem solving Knowledge workforce from the talent pool in a country to region. Labor oversupply is a common theme in digital outsourcing economies. We suggest Kenya for its comparative advantage in skilled labor, train-ability and the high levels of technical graduates. For massive scale, Philippines is an excellent option but with greater scale comes less visibility into the operations. Ask for for help on how to scale and where!
Look for Domain experts
Data workers handling millions of private individuals data in a country in another timezone is a scary concept to any sensible business owner. At Cion, we encourage our customers to ask for our legal history, registration documents, our cyber-security policy and how we prevent data theft. Cybercrime is at an all time high and medium sized firms who often need outsourcing the most are often vulnerable to their customer data, IP technologies and custom software being stolen and resold by hackers and cyber criminals. A few basic prerequisites in a companies IT infrastructure and thorough knowledge of international data laws (ie GDPR) is MANDATORY for an outsourcing manager. If they have this, look for better vendor who does.
Cion’s approach focuses on automation and building knowledge leaders. We have seen automation replace many BPO roles in the last 5 years and the trend is only increasing. An outsourcing firm that trains, retrains and pivots its workforce onto high skilled tasks as automation increases is one that is future proofed. Look for talk of automation and highly skilled workers with solid degrees, solid portfolios, regular commits on github accounts, kaggle rankings and other indicators of technical and domain excellence.
All of Cion’s teams think for a living. We encourage problem solving by researching problems and give our junior workers access to training and career development so they can move up the skills ladder.
Are you interested in learning more about outsourcing? Are you speaking or working with vendors? Are you building for scale?
Contact daven@ciondata.com for a free due diligence checklist with all the questions you’ll need to ask your potential outsourcing provider!