Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Metrics for improvement

Continuity also assists in benchmarking the success of the deal – or lack of it. The key is to start from the basics and understand whether the original in-house organization had challenging metrics. The odds are it did not.

A lot of companies – even major global organizations – that have not outsourced still operate with either very rudimentary or non-existent SLAs. This results largely from the fact that functions are seen as having their own discrete budgets, or from the use of a centralized funding mechanism that absorbs expenses without recharging them to the unit responsible. So it is only when recharging or cross-charging is introduced that questions arise – typically resulting in exchanges such as: ‘Why are we ...