Development of an Assessment-Tool for Procurement Business Process Outsourcing

Diploma Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,4, Stralsund University of Applied Sciences, 48 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: to the fact of increasing globalization, mergers & acquisitions, cost pressure and growing expectations of the customers regarding price and quality, companies have to reconsider their strategy and organizational structure. If companies are not able to stand the challenge and can t fulfill the expectations they will loose customers and consequently market share. To remain competitive they have to shorten the development time for products and optimize methods, structures and organizations in regard to cut the costs. To face these challenges appropriate solutions are needed. One possibility to achieve this is outsourcing. The special type IT-outsourcing (ITO) is already accomplished by many companies but more and more companies are taking into account the possibility of business process outsourcing (BPO). BPO is very critical and has to be considered carefully. Companies give away their in-house functions to external service provider. This comprises a dependency and requires a high degree of trust. Once the decision is made it is hard and cost intensive to reverse it. Finding an appropriate business model for example shared service centers, joint ventures or outsourcing to an external provider and identifying adequate onshore, nearshore or offshore locations requires profound knowledge and intensive consulting support.The first chapter introduces into this thesis. Chapter 2 gives a fundamental theoretical background of the outsourcing terminology including the types of outsourcing, intelligent sourcing terminology and different outsourcing models. The next chapter covers BPO of procurement, a special area of BPO. It describes the relevance for outsourcing the procurement function with its advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore the current market situation as well as possible locations for procurement BPO are part of this chapter. Part 4 presents gedas company and provides general information regarding the organization and the service portfolio. In chapter 5 information about the development of the assessment tool are provided. The gedas consulting framework is briefly introduced and it is shown how the intelligent sourcing framework can be integrated into to the existing gedas consulting framework. The main part covers the description of the development of the assessment tool for procurement BPO and its different components followed by a case study.