Strategic Sourcing

What role has Human Capital Management to play in the question of strategic sourcing?

We believe: it is core

For any task in your organisation, you have to ask yourself how close it is to your core competences, i.e. the ones from which the organisation derives it’s competitive advantage. Based on this and a few other factors (most notably available capabilities and resources) you have to answer the question: which resources should you use to perform this task:

• Your core staff – the people you constantly invest in to retain and develop?
• Further staff on permanent contracts?
• Agency staff or employees on temporary contracts?
• Freelance subcontractors?
• Outsourced services?
• Consultants, who, although performing strategically important tasks, will leave after the task is completed or they put your own employees into a position to perform the task themselves?

Few organisations these days have a holistic view of these issues. While the HR department deals with permanent staff and in most cases temp staff, other alternatives are dealt with by departments labelled “procurement”, “IT”, “operations” or “corporate organisation”. Therefore, the decision on how and where to perform a certain task depends more on the department that happens to make the decision than on the over arching business strategy and the effect on shareholder value.

Moreover, all these levels of human resources need to be managed. While you may rightly care most about your core staff, everybody working for your organisation should have the right skills, fit your culture and be strongly engaged. An employee from a major fast food chain once told a manager from a BPO-provider: “your people seem to have ketchup instead of blood”. Wouldn’t you want those people who provide outsourced services for you to have that level of engagement?

We believe that these reasons make the need for a holistic view from Human Capital Management necessary to assign tasks to the right layer of human resources and manage and develop all of them to different degrees.

iProCon HCM can help you to build or review your (Human Re)sourcing strategy. Our Rightsourcing Readiness Check based on your business strategy, core competences, capabilities, organisational culture, and market environment builds the foundation for

• making the right sourcing decisions at any time
• building the capabilities to manage change and governance in a sourcing-related transformation.

Ask for a workshop to discuss the right approach for you - contact us.