Companies outsourcing their IT and business processes
are moving away from single-supplier deals and looking to spread
their options, new research has revealed.
In a survey of over 100 businesses across industrial sectors,
more than two-thirds of those polled said they preferred to select
multiple outsourcing suppliers.
Less than a fifth of firms had opted for a single outsourcer,
the study by PMP Research found.
More than three-quarters of the surveyed firms planned to use
multi-sourcing in future, compared with just 16% of companies
intending to stick with a single supplier, the research carried out
for the Evaluation Centre IT procurement website found.
Nearly half the companies said they had tried to switch
outsourcing suppliers or to take services back in house, although
these moves were often described as “difficult” (53%) or “very
difficult” (5%).
Moves to switch suppliers were not necessarily prompted by
dissatisfaction with their performance, the survey found. Half the
surveyed firms reported that service level agreements had been
either met (26%) or exceeded (36%). Instead, organisations were
keen to retain flexibility in their outsourcing deals.
But businesses are struggling to assess the return on investment
in outsourcing deals, with more than half those surveyed finding it
“fairly hard” and another 23% finding it “very hard” to calculate
the financial benefits.
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