Poster presentation from the Living the Future 6 Conference, April 5-8, 2006, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson, AZ. / Talk to UA Library staff who are involved with a unique outsourcing venture with OCLC. As "outsourcees," UA staff provide catalog records for Middle Eastern language cataloging to OCLC. In return, OCLC provides credits for Chinese language cataloging to the UA.

Purpose: This master thesis attempts to propose a guideline for improving logistics performance in terms of cost efficiency and on-time delivery in shipper-TPL provider relationships within offshore outsourcing businesses. Methodology: As a first step, the authors construct a conceptual model based on a thorough literature review. In a second step, empirical data is collected through semi-structured interviews within a single-case study with dyadic perspectives examining the shipper-TPL provider relationship of Ericsson, Sweden and Aramex, Saudi Arabia. Lastly, the authors are able to develop a final detailed model through merging the discovered theoretical and empirical findings. Findings: The findings of this thesis highlight the impact on performance of the factors of communication, culture, work agreements, standardization, system compliance and trust. Based on these factors, the PILOOR Model is developed that illustrates a sequential order of these factors to improve performance. In detail, the findings suggest to start off with communication and culture in order to foster a mutual understanding. Afterwards, work agreements and standardization within processes and communication channels should be established. Thus, considerable efforts are required within the build-up stage of shipper-TPL provider relationships. Within the execution stage, system compliance is found to enhance performance, in which formal and informal communication tools support performance improvements. Finally, this research highlights that trust develops over time by successfully working on the other factors. In addition, it has an overall positive effect on performance once a sufficient level is achieved. Research Implications: This research is the first to propose a guideline for performance improvements within offshore outsourcing of TPL services through the presented PILOOR Model. Thus, this research fills a significant gap within the body of the TPL literature. Furthermore, the PILOOR Model is believed to support practitioners in successfully building-up and executing their offshore outsourcing shipper-TPL provider relationships. Limitations & Further Research: Due to the choice of methodology, this study is limited in terms of generalizability. Therefore, the authors suggest replicating this study within other offshore outsourcing shipper-TPL relationships. Ideally, the developed PILOOR Model should be tested empirically.

This thesis aims to describe and analyse how companies establish and maintain relationship quality when outsourcing offshore. In literature we have identified that companies who outsource offshore encounter difficulties with quality and costs. However most of the contracts are renewed even though they encounter these issues. The reason is because relationships are valued higher. In order to create a long-term successful offshore outsourcing, it is of essence for companies to have guidance in how to establish and maintain an effective and fruitful client-vendor relationship.   The identified research research gap we will address in this thesis is the is a lack of research on how to establish and maintain relationship quality in an offshore outsourcing relationship, in terms of exploring the topic from both the client and the vendor perspective.   In the literature review theories and previous research on offshore outsourcing overall is presented, as well as explains what successful and unsuccessful is. The literature review elaborates on relationship quality and social exchange theory in relation to offshore outsourcing. Furthermore, it goes into detail of the variables that are of the utmost interest to create relationship quality. These variables are trust, commitment and satisfaction.   In this study both the client’s and the vendor's perspective is illustrated and compared. This was possible by conducting qualitative interviews with both client and vendor. The interviewees all had several years experience of working with outsourcing to or from India. The empirical finding from these interviews were analysed with help from the theoretical framework. However during the interviews we identified that communication is significantly important when establishing and maintaining relationship. To achieve success in an offshore outsourcing project the communication between the client and the vendor should be trustworthy, transparent, honest and clear, also conflicts should be solved through this type of communication.

This dissertation is concerned with the everyday lives of transnational Indian call center workers when situated within the global politics of voice-based outsourcing. The call center economy gained impetus in early 2000-2001, when multinational corporations began to train young men and women in India to mask their spatial and temporal location, in order that they could serve customers in the US and the UK. Taking calls through the night to serve the work day of Western consumers, these customer service agents were asked to assume a different name, location, and cultural and language markers, as part of the requirements of work. I explore the ways in which these young, middle-class workers located themselves within practices, contentious representations, and material outcomes of this transnational outsourcing economy. Through ethnographic research in Pune, a prominent university town and call center hub in western India, I investigate (1) everyday life in and out of the call center, (2) labor management practices within call centers, and (3) the socio-economic and cultural transformations that accompanied and framed the development of the urban Indian call center economy. This research engages with the machinations of multinational corporations as they incorporate large number of labor forces worldwide into transnational work. It builds on three main bodies of theory - flexible or late capital and flexibility, the South Asian postcolonial nation-state, and affective labor. Through these, I provide a thick description of the history, construction, maintenance and disruption of this site, as also the ways in which this particular story of capital was stabilized. I engage with questions such as, what complex negotiations underlie the ostensible success of new service economies in India? What are its cultural, political and economic determinants and ramifications? What grounds are the claims of state, capital and culture being contested or reified upon, and what do such negotiations mean for service workers within the landscape of urban India? This dissertation shows how the practice of everyday life in this transnational milieu is best explained as the collusion and tension between the contested socio-economic spaces of the new Indian middle-classes and middle-class-ness, and an ungrounded discourse of mobile and flexible capital. The stories of call center workers in this analysis are the stories of particular subjects called upon and striving to be constantly flexible in order to successfully become middle-class and global in the same breath, one often seamlessly overlapping the other. / text

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Bakalauro baigiamajame darbe nagrinėjamos ir tiriamos užsakomųjų paslaugų kūrimo prielaidos Lietuvoje. Darbą sudaro dvi pagrindinės dalys – teorinė ir praktinė. Buvo naudojamasi M. Porter penkių jėgų modeliu bei makroaplinkos analize, Brown Douglas bei Wilson Scot paslaugų kūrimo ir vykdymo modeliu. Teorinėje darbo dalyje pateikta užsakomųjų paslaugų sąvokos samprata, jų rūšys, išskirti privalumai ir trūkumai. Aprašytos didžiausią paklausą turinčios paslaugos – tai informacinių technologijų bei darbuotojų nuomos arba verslo proceso užsakomosios paslaugos. Taip pat teorinėje dalyje plačiau nagrinėjamos užsakomųjų paslaugų kūrimo strategijos, bei tolimesni veiksmai diegiant jas įmonėje. Praktinėje darbo dalyje pateikta tyrimo metodologija, išnagrinėta užsakomųjų paslaugų makroaplinka, bei atlikta šakos aplinkos konkurentų analizė. Atliktas kiekybinis tyrimas, kuriuo buvo siekiama išsiaiškinti vartotojų požiūrį į užsakomasias paslaugas, jų kūrimo prielaidas bei tolimesnes pritaikymo galimybes įmonės valdyme. / Outsourcing development presumptions in Lithuania are analyzed and investigated in this Bachelor's thesis. The thesis consists of two main parts - theoretical and practical. To analize and investigated the stated theme M. Porter's five forces model and the macro environment analysis, Brown Douglas and Wilson Scot service creation and execution of the model were used.Theoretical part is intended to present the concept and types of outsourcing service as well as to highlight the advantages and disadvantages. The most popular services are described which are information technologies and employee leasing or outsourcing services of business process. Moreover, outsourcing services strategies are widely analized in the theoretical part as well as further action in introducing them in the company. The practical part of the thesis contains the research methodology, explorationof macro environment of outsourcing service, along with a analysis of competitors. A quantitative study aiming to identify consumer attitudes towards outsourcing services their design assumptions and further application in enterprise management is introduced.

This thesis examines the impact of governance process development on engagements between onshore and offshore subsidiaries of multinational IT services organisations. Offshoring is a significant global phenomenon. Over the last decade, there has been substantial growth in the number of organisations setting up ‘captive’ (wholly owned subsidiaries) centres in offshore locations. The desired benefits of greater coordination, leveraging and sharing of knowledge have, in many instances, failed to materialise for these IT services organisations. These failures arise from a variety of causes including a lack of intra-organisational processes to coordinate and manage work, weak alignment between the parent organisation’s strategic objectives and those of the subsidiary, and the inability to navigate cross-organisational and cultural barriers. This thesis comprises three interrelated projects. The first established that organisations develop offshore subsidiaries in order to obtain one or more of a number of complex and interrelated set of strategic objectives. The second project, through the use of grounded theory, demonstrates that within one IT services organisation, imposed governance processes do not facilitate communication and engagement between the onshore and offshore subsidiaries. Cross-cultural and organisational differences inhibited the engagement between the subsidiaries, thus contributing to the failure to achieve the desired benefits of offshoring. Organisations engaged in captive offshoring are faced with two apparently contradictory sets of issues: a set of highly desirable and interrelated strategic benefits and a variety of operational challenges that arise from the imposed nature of the governance processes. The third project, a case study of a similar IT services organisation, examines how these apparently contradictory issues were resolved. The results show that it is the co-development and implementation of governance processes based on the informal working practices of both the onshore and offshore teams that enable the operational challenges established in the second project to be resolved and thus provide reconciliation between these and the achievement of the strategic benefits that drive offshoring. This thesis concludes that co-developed and implemented governance processes are a key factor in the mitigation of the deleterious effects of cross-organizational and cultural working and adds the notion of co-development and implementation of governance processes to the academic literature on the governance of outsourcing.

Large multinationals must continually innovate to produce products and services that meet the needs of a global market. In order to distribute work across multiple sites, they use techniques such as offshoring and outsourcing. This requires them to address organizational and cultural aspects to coordinate distributed product development activities.  While these techniques have received great interest in business as well as research in recent years, as the latest trend is to send increasingly complex functions such as research, development and engineering (RD&E) overseas. When offshoring involves high value functions, the transitions occur rapidly, and the associated risks and costs of failing increase. In addition to the hidden costs of offshoring and outsourcing, there is a risk of losing core competences over time or spillovers of critical knowledge to competitors in the new market. Despite the criticality of succeeding with their offshoring efforts, little is known considering of how companies handle the process of distributing work globally, and the capabilities they develop to manage offshoring efficiently. The objective of this thesis is to explore the routines and capabilities that organizations´ need to develop to make offshoring an integral part of the management global RD&E.  Two in-depth case studies are used to develop firm specific theories which can inform both the theory and practice of managing offshoring. Case A provides insight into a client-supplier relationship between the Swedish site of a multinational and its Indian service provider. The current challenges identified through the case study are paired with a retrospective analysis of the evolution of the decade-long relationship, to show how the cross-cultural interface has influenced the evolution of the relationship. With the assistance of a literature review, the findings are explained through the theoretical lenses of national culture, organizational culture and contextual factors. Case B provides insight into offshoring management in terms of a product management transfer from a Swedish site to a research center in China of the same multinational. Besides the insights into the transfer of responsibility for a complex product overseas, the case provides the base of an organizational capabilities framework for managing all stages in the offshoring process (decision, transfer, operations and governance stage). Four key capabilities were found to support the management of offshoring, namely; technological skills, process & tools, relationship management and knowledge management. / Effective Outsourcing/Offshoring of Research, Development, and Engineering

This thesis examines the impact of governance process development on engagements between onshore and offshore subsidiaries of multinational IT services organisations. Offshoring is a significant global phenomenon. Over the last decade, there has been substantial growth in the number of organisations setting up ‘captive’ (wholly owned subsidiaries) centres in offshore locations. The desired benefits of greater coordination, leveraging and sharing of knowledge have, in many instances, failed to materialise for these IT services organisations. These failures arise from a variety of causes including a lack of intra-organisational processes to coordinate and manage work, weak alignment between the parent organisation’s strategic objectives and those of the subsidiary, and the inability to navigate cross-organisational and cultural barriers. This thesis comprises three interrelated projects. The first established that organisations develop offshore subsidiaries in order to obtain one or more of a number of complex and interrelated set of strategic objectives. The second project, through the use of grounded theory, demonstrates that within one IT services organisation, imposed governance processes do not facilitate communication and engagement between the onshore and offshore subsidiaries. Cross-cultural and organisational differences inhibited the engagement between the subsidiaries, thus contributing to the failure to achieve the desired benefits of offshoring. Organisations engaged in captive offshoring are faced with two apparently contradictory sets of issues: a set of highly desirable and interrelated strategic benefits and a variety of operational challenges that arise from the imposed nature of the governance processes. The third project, a case study of a similar IT services organisation, examines how these apparently contradictory issues were resolved. The results show that it is the co-development and implementation of governance processes based on the informal working practices of both the onshore and offshore teams that enable the operational challenges established in the second project to be resolved and thus provide reconciliation between these and the achievement of the strategic benefits that drive offshoring. This thesis concludes that co-developed and implemented governance processes are a key factor in the mitigation of the deleterious effects of cross-organizational and cultural working and adds the notion of co-development and implementation of governance processes to the academic literature on the governance of outsourcing.

Companies are increasingly outsourcing business critical activities to suppliers of outsourcing services. As the complexity and business  criticality of the outsourced activities increases, the risk of poor performance increases. This thesis studies large scale outsourcing in the telecom industry where a recent trend is to transfer the development, operation and maintenance of the telecom infrastructure to telecom equipment suppliers. The significance of this type of outsourcing is that the outsourced activity is the revenue generating part of the telecom operators business. Part 1 discusses the purpose and research questions followed by the theoretical underpinning in the research. The research strategy is to study the outsourcing relationship in three distinct stages of its development and the theoretical underpinning applies transaction costs analysis in the Scoping & Search stage and Das &Teng’s (2001) framework of trust and control for managing risks in the Negotiation and Transition stages. This design is in response to calls for a more detailed understanding of how organizations manage risks, it therefore takes the perspective of both the outsourcer and the supplier in the research. Part 2 is a multiple case study of telecom operators in Holland, Sweden and Australia where the supplier in all three cases is Ericsson Global Services organization. The study is further supplemented by mini-cases of large scale IS/IT infrastructure outsourcing. Part 3 has three main parts. Firstly, a cross case analysis of the cases in Part 2; secondly, a discussion of the findings linked to the research questions resulting in a set of propositions. The third and final part covers additional insights and learnings from studying business critical outsourcing and suggestions for further research. The main contributions in the research can be summarised as: Physical asset specificity follows transaction costs logic, however human asset specificity is largely ignored by both outsourcer and supplier Business critical outsourcing by its nature faces a limited market for capable suppliers. This results in single-source negotiations followed by a cooperative stance and open book negotiations. Das & Teng’s (2001) framework for management of risks has been found to have specific directions, some bi-directional and others uni-directional. Furthermore, different dimensions in the framework operate at different managerial levels. Goodwill trust-building operate at the corporate executive level, competence trust-building, output and behavioural control at the level of the negotiation team, and the research indicates that the social control dimension is not applied in business critical outsourcing negotiations. A further finding is that goodwill trust-building precedes all other dimensions of trust and control, and is a pre-requisite for establishing a cooperative stance in the negotiations.