Taming the Document Supply Chain: The Tools That Make Outsourcing Work
Posted on Thu, Jun 30, 2011 @ 11:23 AM
Harnessing Resources
What does a company really need, if it is to exploit the potential of outsourcing to specialist suppliers and still retain control of the key aspects of its business? It needs a particular sort of outsource management software that we have not yet seen packaged in this way as a commercial product.
For the traditional Sefas customer – the financial services institution, insurer, utility, telecoms company or government agency – the requirements are clear. The software suite must be comprehensive, flexible, integrated. It must be capable of pulling together resources that were not necessarily built to work in harmony, so that progress does not depend entirely on the organization’s ability to invest in new hardware or bespoke software solutions at every turn of the road.
Working With Other Systems
It must be able to handle inputs it was never designed for, such as those generated by legacy applications, and generate output in forms that seem to multiply with every year that goes by.
It must be able to hand off jobs smoothly to other systems or suppliers, and to accept inbound tasks or data in a wide range of formats. It must be capable of automating processes and monitoring them at every possible level. It should also be as near transparent and invisible as possible, so that its presence is indicated more by what it enables than by what meets the eye.
It should, in short, do what Open Print does, and go about it in the low key fuss-free way the Sefas product does.
So, if it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Software For An Outsourced World
Maybe that’s it. Maybe that is what Open Print 7.0 has quietly evolved into – the ideal software for managing profitably in an outsourced world.
It has never occurred to me to call this “outsource management software”. That’s a phrase I associate with a few hamfisted, overpriced attempts, several years ago, to combine IT monitoring systems with contract management packages in order to pressure outsourced suppliers into sticking to their commitments and meeting their SLAs. As I recall it, each of those expensive packages seemed to work brilliantly for one set of circumstances and one organization – the one for which it was originally developed. As soon as you moved it across into a different business or technical environment, its usefulness declined abruptly, by about 80 percent.
Perhaps I should be avoiding the phrase “outsource management software” and trying to find another label we could use to describe what this product has become.
Maybe I should hold a competition among readers of this blog to come up with a better tag to describe what Open Print does. But when you’ve got a software suite that’s just right for managing outsourced operations, perhaps there really is no alternative.