Outsourcing: guidelines for a structured approach

Outsourcing is a management approach by which an organization delegates some noncore functions to specialized and ef®cient service providers. In the era of ªglobal marketº and ªe-economyº, outsourcing is one of the main pillars of the new way to conceive the relationships among companies. Despite outsourcing large diffusion, huge business cases and big deals of documentation available on network or press, there is no structured procedure able to support the govern of the evolution of a generic outsourcing process. In accordance with the principles of total quality management, this paper describes a proposal of a new approach for managing outsourcing processes. The model, which can be easily adapted to different application ®elds, has been conceived with the main aim of managing strategic decisions, economic factors and human resources. The approach is supported by different decision and analysis tools, such as benchmarking techniques, multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) methods, cost analysis, and other process-planning methodologies. An application of the method to a real case is also provided.