MANY companies are moving offshore these days and there is a trend with some of these companies making these decisions with insufficient clarity. In the same token many companies are accepting outsourced from offshore sans guidelines. Do you work in a company and have some influence whether your company should outsource its work or accept outsourced work? This column would give you some insight into outsourcing guidelines.Companies have discovered that by moving production to a less expensive place helps them reduce cost dramatically. The benefits are increased productivity, lower prices. Do take note that if you plan to outsource make sure that such an arrangement should provide savings and true added value and it must not remove your companies requirement to manage the process.

Outsourcing decisions should be made with a formal analysis that demonstrates the cost effectiveness of the outsourcing decision. Once this is done every outsourcing arrangement requires Service Level Agreement or SLA. Your outsourcing contract should be well defined and designed to hold the Vendor to a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The SLAs should contain clear ownership and penalties associated with failure to meet minimum service levels. You then select a single individual to be a manager of outsourcing to be made, the single point of contact within the enterprise. You can talk to professionals who have currently outsourced their work and get their feedback.

Some questions to ask is which vendor they selected, why were other vendors eliminated and the reason why the vendor they chose was selected. Ideal places to search for vendors is within your enterprise at other divisions or in other companies or locations.

Sometimes you may not be able to find companies who have outsourced their work. In which case there are number of factors that you need to take into account in deciding your outsourcing vendor. You need to know your vendor. Verify his credentials and reputations as well as the employees in his company.

Some questions to seek answers are for how long has the vendor been in the outsourcing business and how have they managed their successes and failures. Which clients have they done work for and are you confident that they can manage both the size and scope of your outsourced work.

Sometimes the outsourcing company might have a great reputation but the individual assigned to your project may not be someone that you are comfortable enough. You need to have a background check on the vendor?s employees too as some companies hire part timers who may fit into the company?s culture and work ethics.

Make sure that your vendor has time tested credentials and has the money to continue for the long haul. It would sometimes make sense to get a look at their audited financial statements. This component should have a high weightage in the selection process.

There is another issue that warrants attention and you should find out whether your vendor also has contracts with your direct competitors. If they do, are you confident enough that they have mechanisms in place to separate your data and their employees working on your contract. You need to be sure that they have procedures and policies in place to ensure that your precious data and company?s strategic information remains private and secure.

You must be in tune with the quality and quantity of staff that the outsourcer has. If and when they have to hire additional staff to manage your outsource you need to know who these new recruit are.

Be clear and decisive on three important issues. The first is that you must ensure that you retain the right to all owned intellectual property. Secondly all the software developed by the vendor which is paid by your company should be retained by your company. This includes software that may not have been directly requested by your company but was needed to complete the contract.

There are many tricky issues when dealing with outsourcing and it might be difficult to find legal teams in this field as it is fairly new. So it makes sense to do some homework before you accept or offer outsourcing work.

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