Outsourcing centres

Lex Service PLC provides motoring and related business solutions to individual and corporate customers in the UK and Europe. Their services include the provision of BSM driving schools, nationwide repairs centres, outsourcing services for corporate customers, and vehicle importing and retailing. 

In the past 20 years, investments have often been called off in favour of outsourcing to keep fixed costs small and to optimise balances. From the 1990s, financial interests dominated more and more the patient-centred outcome objectives defended by physicians, pharmacists, other health care professionals and the patient himself. The freedom of action for the hospital pharmacist had been redefined and became more restricted. 

Logica Global Outsourcing Services has operations in nine European countries, and production centres in four offshore countries. It comprises three service lines-. 

Fuel cycle and waste management services are outsourced to centralized, economy-of-scale regional centres that operate under international non-proliferation oversight. 

All fuel cycle services and waste management is assumed to be outsourced to a regional fuel cycle centre, which is owned and operated under control of consortia of its customers while under international non-proliferation oversight. 

The more nodes and links that exist in a network then cieariy the more complex it becomes. As a result of outsourcing non-core activities many companies are today much more reliant on external suppliers of goods and services. Those external suppliers also are dependent upon a web of second tier suppliers, and so on. There is a strong likelihood that the focal firm at the centre of the network will not even be aware of many of the second or third tier suppliers that feed their upstream supply chain. The potential for unexpected disruptions to the supply chain is clearly heightened by these extended networks as evidenced by the following example. 

In developing the new logistics and supplier network. Aristocrat had to make important decisions about which parts should be outsourced to global suppliers in low-cost regions, and which should be outsourced to suppliers local to the regional integration centres. It was decided that the split should take place on part characteristics - shown in Table 7.3. 

C. Altomonte, and C. Bonassi. FDI, International Outsourcing and Linkages, CESPRI Working Paper, Centre for Research on Innovation and Internationalisation Processes, Universita Bocconi, Milano, Italy, 2004 (Downloadable from http //econpapers.repec.org/ paper/cricespri/wp 155. htm). 

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