Why Outsource At All?

Capture economies, leverage resources. Companies that push to remain competitive are identifying business tasks that are non-essential to their core business strategies or that may demand significant investments of management resources and capital. By outsourcing these tasks to specialists with economies of scale and expert capabilities, they can reduce cost and risk—enabling them to deploy scarce personnel by concentrating on the critical activity.

Align market fundamentals, pressure for innovation. In fact, process manufacturers have a long history of outsourcing, witnessed by the shift of non-core functions to outside suppliers over the past three decades such as plant construction in the 1970s; process control system design in the 1980s; IT and other back-office services in the 1990s.

The last several years have seen major changes and new trends in the process industries. Increased end-user power; increased globalization of the business, customers and suppliers; increased technological change and accessibility of information; and increased commoditization have led to a new focus for industry. The winners will have a strategy that strives to exceed customer expectations by playing to their core competencies while maintaining the low cost position in the market.

Discover the new lever for process industries. Manufacturers have accelerated the outsourcing of logistics functions, such as freight forwarding, trucking services, tankering, barging and warehousing. However, because of the fragmented nature of the logistics industry, principally due to each vendor's limited specific capabilities, those electing to outsource have been forced to contract with multiple vendors, thereby hindering overall efficiency. We believe that the next several years will see the broad acceptance of completely outsourced logistics management services to trusted providers like Odyssey who have the expertise and technology capable of handling the complexities inherent in process manufacturing logistics management.

Outsourcing to Odyssey can help you meet these challenges. Markets continue to go global. Consolidation, mergers and acquisitions result in either fragmented or disjointed processes, with back-office and support costs increasing as a percent of total spending. This puts even greater emphasis on managing core competencies. Odyssey’s outsourcing options give you the advantage of selecting the “right” solution to navigate these challenges successfully.