The value of outsourcing

The team at Rus­sell & Rus­sell can help busi­ness­es in the Lanark­shire area when it comes to mak­ing deci­sions about out­sourc­ing core func­tions. Here are some of the issues to con­sid­er…

Most busi­ness own­er-man­agers find that they spend only a small per­cent­age of their time on impor­tant strate­gic plan­ning. A great deal of their effort is spent on the day-to-day run­ning of the busi­ness — the ‘house­keep­ing’ side of things.

But do you real­ly need to do all this work your­self, when it is pos­si­ble to get some­one else to do it for you? The chances are that sig­nif­i­cant parts of the car you dri­ve are not made by the man­u­fac­tur­er whose name appears on the badge, nor even assem­bled in their fac­to­ries. Some motor man­u­fac­tur­ers now out­source not only parts but com­plete assem­blies — steer­ing, trans­mis­sions, engines, inte­ri­or assem­blies.

So, if out­sourc­ing can work for major inter­na­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try, what can it do for your busi­ness? Fun­da­men­tal­ly, it can remove from senior man­age­ment the need for close involve­ment with the details of run­ning a busi­ness — free­ing the busi­ness own­ers to con­cen­trate on those aspects of run­ning a busi­ness which tru­ly war­rant expen­di­ture of senior man­age­ment time and effort.

Areas you might con­sid­er out­sourc­ing include:

Payroll

Pay­roll is the most com­mon task that com­pa­nies out­source. Ser­vices include weekly/monthly/quarterly pay­roll and nor­mal­ly attend­ing to the com­ple­tion of the (many) Gov­ern­ment returns.

Under RTI, employ­ers must sub­mit their PAYE infor­ma­tion to HMRC on or before the day of pay­ment.

Human resources

It is pos­si­ble to out­source your human resources require­ments. There are spe­cial­ist com­pa­nies that offer a full range of ser­vices, includ­ing insur­ance, train­ing, recruit­ment, poli­cies and pro­ce­dur­al advice and help with com­ply­ing with the myr­i­ad of Gov­ern­ment employ­ment laws and reg­u­la­tions.

Marketing

Inde­pen­dent mar­ket­ing firms have all the nec­es­sary exper­tise and mate­ri­als. You can out­source your entire mar­ket­ing require­ments, thus sav­ing you the prob­lems of cre­at­ing your own inter­nal infra­struc­ture.

Information systems

Pur­chas­ing and main­tain­ing infor­ma­tion sys­tems, hir­ing and eval­u­at­ing IT staff and train­ing users can all be very dif­fi­cult. By out­sourc­ing your infor­ma­tion sys­tems func­tion, you can obtain the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy and suit­ably skilled per­son­nel.

Delivery

Depend­ing on your prod­ucts and sit­u­a­tion, there are numer­ous options for out­sourc­ing deliv­ery. Com­mon couri­ers might be able to pro­vide a major por­tion of your deliv­ery func­tion. Larg­er busi­ness­es might pre­fer to con­tract a major deliv­ery firm rather than main­tain their own fleet. Either way, you can hire the exper­tise to keep deliv­ery prob­lems and deci­sions off your desk.

The com­mon fea­ture of all these func­tions is that none of them is fun­da­men­tal to your core busi­ness, and that all of them can be bought in at a com­pet­i­tive price. Thus leav­ing you to focus on the real issues: pro­vid­ing the best pos­si­ble ser­vice to your clients, grow­ing your busi­ness and expand­ing your prod­uct lines.

If you are in the Lanark­shire area and would like to dis­cuss out­sourc­ing with Rus­sell & Rus­sell, con­tact us today.