While stuck, the market is warming up its engines in view of the restart. The world around us will certainly be more attentive to creating value for the community, but will have to deal with a pressing competition: global players will give each other a hard time.
In an even more globalized and competitive context, therefore, companies are faced with ever wider and more diversified functions within themselves. This need could make you lose the compass of your business, forcing resources to focus on futile issues, setting aside far more important goals. Recently has been proposed a solution which, as we will see, will give both financial and organizational advantages: outsourcing, as well as the outsourcing of one or more activities of one’s own company to third parties, for a fixed contractual period.
Let’s start with the financial advantages. Outsourcing allows you to keep fixed costs or more generally the growth of operating costs in the short and medium term under control. In fact, such a strategy allows to increase the incidence on variable costs and to decrease the incidence of fixed costs on total costs, generating a reduction of total operating costs.
A second advantage concerns specialization: depending on the assigned activities, the contractor will be able to lighten the workload of the entire organization, allowing resources to concentrate on the tasks that really give value to the company. This will result in greater operating system efficiency and a resulting increase in productivity.
Finally, outsourcing will allow better control of the economic resources by the client, who will be able to concentrate his efforts, both in economic and organizational terms, on the core activities.
All these advantages clash with the attitudes of employers: the heads of companies look distrustfully at outsourcing and who proposes it, since they are worried about losing the governance of some delegated tasks. However, this fear is unfounded, especially if the chosen supplier is able to give guarantees on the activities that have been entrusted to him.
Outsourcing is not very popular in Italy, but widespread abroad. The countries that use it most of all are the United Kingdom and the United States. There the companies maintain control of some key activities, such as communication, research and development, while the rest is entrusted to third parties, so specialized as to be excellent allies for companies of international renown.
As if that wasn’t enough, outsourcing has undergone some regulatory changes. The new legislative decrees 25/2017 and 124/2019 are more restrictive on the economic treatment reserved for contractors. In essence, the remuneration is, at the moment, completely entrusted to the client: the company will have to make a great economic effort to take advantage of it, without being able to count on any type of state incentive. Who knows if, given the situation, the government will not also think about raising awareness and support for the use of outsourcing: it cannot be admitted that it would be a valuable tool to allow companies to focus on the main activities, essential for the restart, without neglecting all the other activities which, although not indispensable, contribute to keeping the organization alive.