Outsourcing on Today’s Graduating Engineers
Engineers, no matter what discipline, are a high commodity these days. The industry is at a point where a lot of the older engineers are retiring, which leaves jobs and openings for engineers just graduating from college. The question is where will they be working. Will they be working for a Fortune500 company or and up-and-coming company? A lot of companies outsource work these days. One might ask, “What is outsourcing?” In this paper, I will explain to you outsourcing, and its effects on today’s graduating engineers.
What is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm or making better use of time and energy costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of land, labor, capital, (information) technology and resources.
Process of Outsourcing
1. Outsourcing Decision - The decision to outsource is taken at a strategic level and normally requires board approval. The process begins with the client identifying what is to be outsourced and building a business case to justify the decision. Only once a high level business case has been established for the scope of services will a search begin to choose an outsourcing partner. Due to the complexity of work definition, pricing, and legal terms and conditions, clients often utilize the advisory services of outsourcing consultants to assist in scoping, decision making, and vendor evaluation.
2. Suppliers Proposals – This is when a company contacts suppliers asking them for a proposal and a price.
3. Supplier Competition – This is when a company receives proposals and pricing from suppliers. The company evaluates the pros and cons of each supplier. The company conducts meetings with the suppliers to find out their plan for execution this project/proposal. From there, the company creates a Bid-Tab sheet comparing each supplier.
4. Negotiations - The negotiations take the suppliers’ proposal, the Bid-Tab sheet and convert these into contract agreements with the suppliers for the best contract.
5. Contract Finalization - a contractual agreement that defines how the client and the supplier will work together. This is a legally binding document and is core to the governance of the relationship. There are three significant dates that each party signs up to the contract signature date, the effective date when the contract terms become active and a service commencement date when the supplier will take over the services.
Based on the textbook and my understanding, whenever there are negotiations between a procurer and a supplier regarding a competitive bidding, the first thing that might be favored is the scope of the project, meaning both will sit down and discuss the entire project prior the work begins. Meanwhile, during the negotiations, evaluation criteria should be clear, and stated and defined. As the evaluation is based on the criteria stated and the procurer can request or ask the supplier’s opinions on certain specifications and where things can be improved.
Outsourcing simply means acquiring services from an external organization instead of using internal resources (Butler, 2000). By using outsourced resources, organizations can gain a competitive advantage by utilizing contingent staff to accomplish strategic goals without incurring the fixed overhead. By focusing on the leading edge and highly specialized skill sets, outsourcing providers can often offer higher quality services, or at a lower price than the client organization. Typical reasons for outsourcing go beyond simple contingent staffing. Outsourcing providers are able to maintain economies of scale with regard to specialization (...
...hing that was not ever the easiest type of contract to navigate but over the years the requirements have continued to get more complicated and require a lot of additional effort on the contract and the contracting officer. A contracting officer does not just accept the data supplied by the supplier as acceptable. A contract officer will have to perform due diligence and verify the information submitted. This means that the contracting officer will have to verify the material costs, the labor costs, the travel costs, and any of the data supplied.
Offshoring or offshore outsourcing is the practice of a company or a firm hiring or contracting in utilizing the services, skills or labor of the personnel from an outsourcing service provider that specializes in the need that they are looking for such as develop systems, customer service or even write code either from a developing or under developed countries, in their efforts to lower their operational costs and improve their service efficiencies and quality of their products. The former company is called ‘the Outsourcer or the Client’ who pays the money for the services obtained and the later company is called ‘the Outsourcee’ for providing the services to the outsourcer.
Outsourcing is obtaining goods or services from a foreign supplier in place of going in the country for these things. There are many debated effects of outsourcing on the economy, and there are several pros and cons to this practice. Even though there are many pros, the overall economy of America would be better off with minimal outsourcing.
Outsourcing manufacturing services to a network of suppliers can provide organizations the ability to adjust the production capability upward or downward, at a lower cost, when trying to match the demand conditions. Outsourcing can also decrease the product design cycle time
Outsourcing, the practice of transferring certain job functions to companies whose employees perform them for less money overseas, is not something that only happens in the corporate world. Following in the footsteps of corporate outsourcing, some state governments, including the state of California, are also beginning to outsource state-funded projects, departments, and services.
As esteemed journalist Tom Piatak wisely puts it, “The trickle of outsourcing threatens to become a flood.” His words speak the truth as outsourcing has left United States’ workers jobless, and it continues to increase the unemployment rate every year. During February of 2009, American workers lost a record 651,000 jobs alone, increasing the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent, the highest it has been in 25 years (Katel). Multinational corporations, hoping to cut down costs and stay profitable in the market, outsource by exporting American jobs to third-world countries such as China and India. It may seem noble that outsourcing provides third-world countries with job opportunities, but the United States’ markets and industries are greatly affected. Outsourcing is harmful to the United States’ economy because it paves the way for job losses, decreases product consumption, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor.
Outsourcing has been around for many years. In this paper I will discuss some of the history of outsourcing, the goods things about outsourcing, and the bad things about outsourcing.
For firms who are purchasing semi finished goods from outside supplier will make a contract for a long period and due to repeated relationship the fir...
Outsourcing is a technique for companies to reassign specific responsibilities to external entities. There are several motivations for outsourcing including organizational, improvement, cost, and revenue advantages (Ghodeswar & Vaidyanathan, 2008).
This system connects, accumulates, processesas well as provides imperative information to all parties thus enhancing continuity in the procurement process. However, if valid output is to be expected, features as well as requirements of the procurement process must be compatible to current system technologies (Giner, et al, 2011). The harmonization of suppliers as enhanced through the adoption of electronic sourcing enables firms to readily identify new potential suppliers for specific needs when old suppliers` capabilities are in question. The adoption of E-tendering that supports sending requests of pricesand information to suppliers as well as receiving suppliers responses improves on procurement efficiencies as it leads to significant cost reductions thus leading to better procurement performance through cost savings.For this system to achieve desired results however,all users must beready and willing to adopt the new systemsso enable seamless adoption and consequently ensure optimal
This paper examines the legal aspects of procurement management and specifically how procurement management can be used as an effective tool for the overall management of a project. This paper focuses on the basics of common contract laws, the basics of agency law, the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), and some aspects of that pertaining to the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). A summation of the company’s position in relation to a given supplier (provided the company decides not to procure all of the material in a contract) will be examined along with how that position is strengthened by understanding the legal aspects of procurement management. Finally, the paper will analyze how the project manager is supported by the contract management function. Fleming (2003) posited that there is a clear and important distinction that should be made that delineates the work of the project from the inside work of the company.
establishing a collaborative relationship between the OD practitioner and the members of the client system. A major component of entering and contracting is to make a good decision about how to carry out the OD process. The contract allows the parties involved to explicitly set the direction of the project and how the process will take place. The OD contract will generally address three key areas: setting mutual expectation or what each party expects to gain from the OD process; the time and resources that will be devoted to it; and the ground rules for working together and the stating of what are the proper roles of all the parties involved including the practitioner.