Logistics & Transportation

“Supply chain executives are starting to apply more comprehensive analysis to outsourcing decisions, such as factoring in agility, responsiveness and cost,” said Michael Dominy, research director at Gartner. “Companies must focus on what they can do best and appropriately outsource activities that value chain partners can do better. This often means using one or more logistics, manufacturing or business process outsourcing (BPO) partners, instead of performing these supply chain activities themselves.”

“Successful supply chain executives must be able to manage outsourcing partners. That’s what we hear from our supply chain clients,” Mr. Dominy said. “Based on this feedback and other Gartner research, we have identified eight key best practices that companies should leverage when outsourcing logistics, manufacturing or supply chain management business process outsourcing (SCM BPO). These best practices can help companies avoid some of the key pitfalls associated with supply chain outsourcing.”

Best practices in supply chain outsourcing include:

Align the outsourcing strategy with the corporate and supply chain strategy
Understand your current capabilities in managing supply chain outsourcing partners
Understand your core competencies, the market participants and the points of overlap
Make outsourcing decisions based on strategic and tangible factors, not just cost
Numerous companies that have outsourced a supply chain function such as manufacturing purely based on direct costs have experienced problems later
Understand how corruption and intellectual property (IP) risks differ by country in key outsourcing regions, such as Asia

WorldShoring has put together the right transportation and logistic sector partners who understand and are experienced in managing your supply chain.