Abstract

Outsourcing is a powerful way for organizations to enhance service, save money, and focus on core competencies while helping develop a cost-effective global chain that meets the increasing needs of customers regarding cost, flexibility, and responsiveness.  Companies initiating outsourcing collaborations must decide not only between in sourcing versus outsourcing and near shoring versus far shoring; leaders must consider the scope of global projects.  The purpose of this qualitative research was to conduct a follow-up with a case study that was conducted on a consumer electronics service company located in Northern USA under the pseudonym company name Megan Bay Enterprise (MBE) corporation.  In this case analysis the decision makers wanted to track the effects if any of the initial case analysis and weigh out MBE’s stand on the 2013 case analysis that had outlined benefits of opting to outsource to Sub-Saharan Africa (see Appendix A) instead of using in-house workforce to perform their core competency of customer service tasks.  The participant sample was consistent with the 2013 case analysis and contained a purposeful sample of 20 MBE employees that had the same range of 1 to 15 years of working experience.  The same 2013 questionnaire was applied when interviewing the managers at MBE Corporation.  The present findings from the 2015 case analysis were undeviating from the first study and confirmed the following themes (a) gaining benefits such as opportunities to improve performance, (b) increase efficiency, (c) lower costs, and (d) increasing focus on core competencies.  The proposed results could contribute to the organizational leaders understanding of the advantages of outsourcing by corporations that are relentless in using in-house workforce and cynical about using experienced outsourcing workforce for their services.

Keywords: Outsourcing, Sub-Saharan Africa, workforce, operations management, cost