Efficiency and the scope of outsourced services: a client firm’s absorptive capacity perspective of knowledge-intensive services

Abstract

PurposeStrategic literature has focused on how economies of scale in a firm offering outsourcing may generate incentives for clients to increase the outsourced services, but there has been limited research on how the clients’ features may influence the scope of services that they hire with an outsourcing provider. This study analyzes whether a client’s efficiency motivates it to increase ties with a specific provider of knowledge-intensive services in the context of business process outsourcing (BPO). We further explore whether industry conditions moderate the relationship.Design/methodology/approachA research framework is developed consisting of three main hypotheses. We combine industry data and proprietary and financial data from a longitudinal sample of 107 client firms of a multinational outsourcing service provider to test our hypotheses.FindingsWe find that more efficient firms hire more services from an outsourcing provider and that the munificence of the client firm’s industry positively moderates this relationship. Our results suggest that efficient clients can better keep transaction costs under control when accessing, assimilating, and exploiting the knowledge embedded in an expanded set of services provided by an outsourcing supplier.Originality/valueThis study extends the absorptive capacity perspective by showing that a client’s efficiency reinforces its opportunities to absorb knowledge-intensive services from a supplier when expanding the range of operations in the context of BPO.

Criação de um sistema de medição de desempenho para uma empresa de prevenção a fraudes

“…Dentre os desafios operacionais do BPO, pode-se apontar para: i) falta de parceria entre cliente e provedor; ii) a falta de sustentabilidade em desempenho e inovação; iii) a falta de encaixe entre soluções homogêneas de provedores e contextos heterogêneos de clientes; e iv) a incapacidade de criar, compartilhar e alavancar conhecimento ). Criação de um sistema de medição de desempenho para uma empresa de prevenção a fraudes de serviços prestados por um fornecedor terceirizado (Ellimäki, Aragón-Correa & Hurtado-Torres, 2021;Da Silva & Farias, 2018).…”

“…Empresas desenvolvedoras de soluções BPO passam por um disruptivo crescimento devido ao valor trazido pelo aumento da confiança nas relações digitais entre clientes e provedores desse tipo de serviço (Mazumder & Gard, 2021;Lacity et al, 2011). Igualmente, a eficiência percebida por um cliente reforça sua intenção de expandir a gama de suas operações no contexto de BPO (Ellimäki et al, 2021). Há desafios relacionados à mutualidade de inovação e padronização (Zarzycka et al, 2019) e riscos operacionais e estratégicos associados (Mehta et al, 2020).…”

“…Rajani et al, 2022); eficiência dos serviços terceirizados e economias de escala (e.g. Todavia, não foi encontrado um corpo teórico robusto que se focasse na medição de desempenho de empresas de BPO ou no desenvolvimento e na implementação desses sistemas em tais empresas, apesar de serem fundamentais para a competitividade delas e para a mitigação de riscos, especialmente os riscos de integração Ellimäki et al, 2021;Mehta, Hafeez, Ali, Rahi & Saleem, 2020;Zarzycka, Dobroszek, Lepistö & Moilanen, 2019).…”

“…Ellimäki et al, 2021),_____________________________________________________________________ Martins, C. E. H., Souza, R. C. S., Costa Júnior, J. F., & Sousa Neto, M. V. (2023, jan./abr.). relacionado ao trabalho em BPOs (e.g.…”

Offshoring, hierarchical control and transnational and dynamic environments

“…Over recent decades, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have offshored their manufacturing activities to low-cost countries to improve competitive advantages. In particular, MNEs have increasingly offshored their value-added activities that have traditionally been kept in home countries, such as advanced technology design, research and development (R&D) and innovation activities for increased speed to market and access to global technological knowledge-base and talent pools (Papanastassiou et al, 2020;Du et al, 2023;Ellim€ aki et al, 2021;Rahko, 2021; for a recent review, see Papanastassiou et al (2020), Du et al (2023)). Since innovation activities have been increasingly offshored, it is a critical management decision for MNE managers to select an appropriate governance structure for innovation offshoring to protect MNE's knowledge assets on the one hand and to utilize foreign partners' R&D resources in different national environments on the other.…”