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

. . . through the new generation of suppliers

Realizing similar flexibility across your business means appreciating the benefits of outsourcing, and embracing it as a means to execute strategy and achieve both your immediate performance objectives and wider strategy. The more you use external sourcing as an underpinning of your development as an organization, the more you will find yourself creating – and encouraging – strategic alignment between yourself and your suppliers.

This raises one of the major inhibitors to successful long-term outsourcing relationships. We have already pointed out that the customer’s CEO needs to recognize outsourcing’s potential to deliver benefits way beyond mere cost cutting – and that too few do so. But there is ...