Onshoring | Offshoring | Nearshoring | Smartshoring | Outsourcing

Companies want every advantage possible to surpass their competition, prompting them to explore alternative business strategies that bolster year-over-year growth. Resource strategies such as onshoring, offshoring, nearshoring, smartshoring, and outsourcing can significantly impact budgets, production, service, delivery, and operations. Each of these resource business strategies has inherent benefits and considerations. Choosing the best option for your company depends on your business model and goals. 

Onshoring

Often utilized as a cost-reduction strategy, companies may relocate production or operations within their own country, enabling employees to easily connect across time zones and keep projects moving in real-time. This is a desirable alternative to the delays or language barriers that sometimes accompany offshoring resource solutions.

New locations within a company’s existing country can also lower costs such as rent and salaries or provide greater access to professionals with specialized skills. Relocating to certain markets that are hubs of industry experience, such as Silicon Valley (technology), Los Angeles (entertainment), New York City (media), and Detroit (automotive), can help companies reach their goals more effectively.

Offshoring

Relocating part of your company, specifically a business process team or function, to another country is known as offshoring. Executives desiring cost savings and business efficiency will most likely consider offshoring to create or maintain a competitive cost advantage. In recent years, the benefits of offshoring have continued to expand, giving companies access to specialized skills and innovation opportunities. Offshoring provides companies with round-the-clock support in areas such as business processes, data management, eCommerce, quality assurance, customer service, IT, sales, software development, and project development. By eliminating downtime across time zones, companies can work faster and more efficiently.  

Nearshoring

Companies seeking nearshore business support look to neighboring countries or regions for cost-effective resources or to relocate some of their operations. They benefit from similar time zones, minimized supply chain disruptions, lower-cost skilled professionals, and reduced tariffs.

While nearshoring has its benefits, its potential disadvantages are still important to consider. They include language barriers, cultural differences, cost increases, and fluctuating travel costs. Each can cause delays in productivity and delivery if not managed effectively.  

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Smartshoring

While offshoring and nearshoring leverage benefits that other countries offer, they can also present disadvantages such as cultural differences, language barriers, political or economic instability, and varied labor compliance legalities. Smartshoring offers a common-sense approach to business operations and resourcing, facilitating flexibility backed by technology and global expertise. Depending on a company’s needs, smartshoring may include a combination of employees and outsourced contractors, in-office and remote support, short-term and long-term third-party agencies, and local and international resources.

Companies needing 24/7 support find smartshoring an ideal solution. Through smartshoring, which might include a combination of onshore, offshore, nearshore, and outsourced business solutions, companies can create an optimized business model backed by additional subject matter experts, automated processes, and innovative technological solutions that keep their operations running any time of day or night.

Outsourcing

Before outsourcing became commonplace, employees and in-house experts delivered strategic planning, projects, and tasks. Outsourcing became an attractive business solution as executives sought opportunities to lower costs and increase profit margins. In the late 20th century, companies outsourced select functions that they needed help to handle internally, such as manufacturing and fulfillment services. This business strategy evolved into outsourcing necessary functions, including accounting, IT, security, human resources, and more. Today, outsourcing allows in-house teams to focus on higher-value deliverables while outsourced teams deliver projects, tasks, or function-based responsibilities. 

Since outsourcing is not limited by location, resources may be local, onshore, offshore, nearshore, or smartshore. It offers flexibility and scalability, so companies can accelerate deliverables, elevate capabilities, upgrade quality, and improve customer experiences.  

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Which business resource strategy is right for your company?

Whether you want to balance your company’s budgets, scale your teams to improve performance, streamline operations, or get jobs done faster, strategic resourcing solutions such as onshoring, offshoring, nearshoring, smartshoring, and outsourcing can strengthen your company and teams. If you haven’t explored these options yet, why not? If you have, is your company working effectively? Business operations must continually evolve to be healthy and competitive. Resource augmentation and operations support from third-party experts can help.

Find out how outsourcing and our customized resource solutions can support your company’s goals by contacting us today.