Strategic Management in a Globalized Economy

Wk 6 assingment

Kamalpreet singh

k.singh.206@westcliff.edu

Westcliff University

             Course No: BUS 525                

     Leading Strategic Change within Organization

Professor: Dr. Kevin Grant

         Go to www.google.com, and do a search on "outsourcing." Identify at least two companies in different industries that have entered into outsourcing agreements with firms with specialized services. In addition, describe what value chain activities the companies have chosen to outsource. Do any of these outsourcing agreements seem likely to threaten any of the companies' competitive capabilities? Are the companies using strategic alliances to manage their outsourcing?

        Two examples of outsourcing are as follows:

a Staples Brazil (office Products Company) has partnered with an Indian IT company- Infosys to outsource its account receivables process

.b Parexel (clinical trials company) partnered with IBM to outsource its recruitment process.

Staples Brazil is in the business of selling office products and services to individual and business customers in Brazil. They had outsourced their payment tracking and collection processes to Infosys, to ensure timely recover of payments form customers and hence reduced working capital/debt.

a. In this case, outsourcing contracts do not hurt company’s competitive abilities as collection is not core to their retail business; rather it is more ofa support function and required to ensure timely recovery of dues from customers.  

b. No the company didn’t pursue strategic alliances, rather it was more in the nature of a pure client-customer relationship pure outsourcing contract.      

Parexel is in the business of conducting clinical trials for global pharmaceutical and medical product companies. They had outsourced their employee recruitment process to IBM to ensure reduced time to hire talented manpower and better quality of candidates