The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every industry in the world and has incurred many operational and financial challenges. Companies are now looking for ways to deal with the challenges while addressing the needs of their customers, clients, or employees. For instance, a good number of businesses have also taken the step of cutting down their IT costs in any possible way to cope up with this situation. It might look like a risky step since IT is crucial in today’s digital world. However, it comes with a higher cost, and avoiding in-house IT departments can help in saving a lot of money. On the other hand, outsourcing can prove as a great cost-effective alternative. Companies can opt for remote IT support as well as other services as the most effective solution to the issue.
Nearly one-third of the companies are reducing their IT budgets to make way for other aspects that are more crucial. While many companies can go back to the normal state without cost-cutting, small businesses, who can’t afford it and lack space or labour funds for the IT department, need to take this step if they wish to survive in the industry. However, cost-cutting is not an issue now since business owners can outsource IT solutions and get significant benefits from it.
In this article, we will discuss why businesses should opt for outsourcing their business needs and in what way it can help them to overcome challenges due to the novel coronavirus crisis.
What is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing is a method of agreement where a company reaches out to external vendors for carrying out their business functions or operations. You can either relocate the business tasks to a nearby country known as nearshoring or a distant country known as offshoring. A few tasks that can be outsourced are inventory management, orders, transactions, payroll processing, etc. Apart from that, you can also outsource other non-core processes such as call centre, image manipulation, transcription, data conversion, accounting and bookkeeping, OCR clean up, and more.
How can Outsourcing boost your business
With the help of outsourcing, you can let a third party company handle your business tasks or jobs. This not only helps in eliminating the business load but also helps in cutting down the operational costs. Cost-cutting is one of the top reasons why companies prefer outsourcing their needs to a service provider. However, it is not the only advantage it offers. Apart from that, there are a lot more that can be gained through outsourcing, which is less known to the world. A few of them are mentioned below.
1. Access to latest technology
While outsourcing certain tasks to a company or individual, you are associating with them and forming a partnership. This partnership can help you to gain access to the latest technology that can help in improving your business. For example, let’s say you are outsourcing HR tasks to a company that uses innovative payroll and benefits software. In that case, you can get access to this software and enable your companies to access information and maintain company records in the most effective way.
2. Focusing on other business areas
Companies usually tend to outsource the tasks to save money as well as brainpower. To prove this, let us take the example of the human resources department. HR employees spend most of their time working on non-strategies tasks like maintain records. However, this time can be rather spent on more important matters, like engaging employees and improving job satisfaction. In that case, the non-strategic works can be outsourced to companies, while HR employees can focus on using their brainpower to help the company grow.
3. Launching new projects
While launching a new project, a company may take weeks or even months to gather up and secure the resources that are needed to get started. For that, they need to recruit and onboard a large number of employees before launching the project. However, if they do not have the time to wait for the launch, then they can consider outsourcing their needs to a company that is having the required resources to take on the new project.
4. Reduction of risks
With outsourcing, there is a decrease in the number of risks since you will be sharing the risks of new endeavours and business investment with your partnering company. That is why it is very important to choose the right company that can help in guiding your decisions and managing the risks. For example, if you are outsourcing your accounting needs to a company, then make sure that they have a team of experienced accountants, who are well aware of risk analysis and management.
5. Keeping up with the competition
Outsourcing is not only for large corporations and can be used by anyone. It is especially beneficial for small companies since they do not have the budget or resources to handle their operations. Apart from that, it is best to outsource as it will fit their budgetary needs, and they do not even have to worry about hiring more people to bring in the fresh talents. In addition to that, it will allow them to compete with large companies by offering the same expertise, resources, and services to their potential clients.
HOW CAN AFRICA HR SOLUTIONS HELP YOU OUTSOURCE YOUR BUSINESS OPERATIONS IN AFRICA
Africa HR Solutions offers a full range of reliable services to facilitate your business operations on the African continent:
- Hire people on the African continent without a registered entity
- Complete payroll rundown and management
- Central point of contact for all your queries
- Guaranteed compliance to local laws
- Professional indemnity and employer liability
