Insourcing and outsourcing are useful methods used to disperse work among different departments and organizations for strategic perspectives. While insourcing is typically done within a company’s own operational infrastructure, outsourcing uses organizations that are not associated with the outsourcing company to perform a certain task.

When it comes to business operations, choosing between outsourcing and insourcing can be hard. This post will dive deep into the difference between the two to help you decide the best type of sourcing for your business.

What is Insourcing?

Insourcing is a technique of assigning a project to staff or department within the company instead of providing the task to the outside of the company. A simple example is using in-house engineers to draft technical manuals for certain equipment they have already designed, instead of assigning the task to an outside technical company. In this case, the engineers are required to undergo special training before embarking on this task.

Insourcing is commonly done during interpretative times of competences to help cut down numbers in transport, labors, and taxes. It is more prevalent with manufacturing companies that outsource services from an external company to cut costs and reduce their tax burden. Insourcing can also be used when temporary employees fill vacant positions within the company for a short period. Insourcing also seems to be common among organizations that are dissatisfied with domestic outsourcing.

What is Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a common practice of dispersing certain functions and processes to an outside party or vendor instead of allocating it to an in-house employee or department. For example, a manufacturing company can shift its production to a contract manufacturer, located in another country but operating on a relatively lower cost. The functions can be outsourced to either an individual or company.

Over the past few years, outsourcing has grown tremendously with a global market size of about 88.9 billion dollars, which is almost double of what was recorded in 2000. This shows that more and more organizations are outsourcing their work.

Although domestic outsourcing has received some critics before regarding the loss of jobs and its effect on the economies of nations that outsource, it has slowly found the majority of supporters in the past few years.

Outsourcing Vs. Insourcing

Some factors such as time management, resource management, and control over a certain project can depict the key difference between insourcing and outsourcing.

Here are a few significant comparisons between insourcing and outsourcing.

Business Quality Control

Insourcing allows a company to track the operations processes and lets you take control over the quality of the work to ensure increased productivity to help you achieve your desired results. With insourcing, it’s also possible to test and fix alterations in different projects quickly and when needed. Additionally, it also develops a strong relationship with your employees, allowing you to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Outsourcing on the other hand often has little to no managerial control over how the outside organization operates. However, outsourcing can help your business become more flexible, agile, adapt to changes in market conditions, and provide cost savings benefits.

Reduced Costs

The costs associated with insourcing is quite expensive for a company because of the implementation of new operations and methods to start a separate division of the company. It escapes middlemen costs such as unnecessary fees and commissions.

Outsourcing is a cost-effective way to get the job done. The technique utilizes a developed labor force of an external company to do tasks. Not only does it cut cost, but also skip the cost of health insurance, vacation fees, and any other staff benefit.

Resources

Companies that outsource services do not use their own resources for manufacturing products and providing services. Organizations can outsource services to use the time to focus on important aspects of the organization. When a company outsources non-core activities, it helps to improve productivity and efficiency in their daily operations. Insourcing uses resources that belong to a specific company to achieve a certain goal.

Conclusion

For companies that solely require temporary business needs or little investment, insourcing can be the best option for these businesses. It assures of quality and renders with qualified personnel, resources, as well as approaches to work on a certain project.

When a company needs to reduce expenses but still have the chance to utilize expertise personnel, outsourcing is the best bet. Outsourcing has become accessible for all size companies and is used to help businesses delegate non-core functions to another company, while they get to save money in the process.

Your business has enough on its plate. Outsource what makes sense for your business, choose a world-class SaaS technology solution and focus on what's important: your clients. Call 1-877-478-0576 or fill out an online form to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.

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